An Assessment of the Evolution of Research and Systems - Man-Machine Dialogue: Design and Challenges - page 2

Chapter 1
An Assessment of the Evolution
of Research and Systems
Man-machine dialogue (MMD) systems appear more present in the works
of science-fiction than in reality. How many movies do we know which show
computers, robots, or even fridges and toys for children who can talk and
understand what they are told? The reality is more complex: some products
that have come from new technologies, such as cell phones or robot
companions, talk and understand a few words, but they are far from the
natural dialogue which science-fiction has been promising for years.
The ideas for application are not lacking. Implementing a dialogue with a
machine could be useful for getting targeted information, and this could be
for any type of information: transportation [LAM 00], various stores, tourist
or recreational activities [SIN 02], library collections, financial administrative
procedures [COH 04], etc., see [GAR 02] and [GRA 05]. The dialogue is
indeed adapted to the step-by-step elaboration of a request, a request that
would be difficult to hold in a single utterance or in a command expressed in a
computer language. The first field of application of MMD that includes
question-answering systems (QAS) is sometimes defined as information-
seeking dialogue. When the dialogue only concerns a single topic, for
example railway information, we talk of closed-domain dialogue. When the
dialogue can be about pretty much anything, for example the questioning of
the encyclopedic database as IBM Watson recently did with a TV show task,
we talk of open-domain dialogue [ROS 08]. If we reuse the example of the