Information Technology Reference
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introduction, a unique utterance with no dialogue could be as follows: “I
would like to topic a single journey to Paris taking the shortest itinerary as
long as it takes less than half an hour (otherwise I do not wish to make a
reservation)”. The elaboration of a natural dialogue is much more flexible: it
allows the user to express a first simple request and then improve it according
to the machine's answer; it allows the machine to transfer information for a
future action, and confirm or negate along the way [PIE 87]. The total number
of words to arrive at the same result might be greater, but the spontaneity of
the utterances and their speed as well as the ease of production is more than
fair compensation. The example of questioning a yellow-page-style directory,
[LUZ 95] shows another advantage of dialogue: the user can obtain the
address of a taxidermist even when he/she does not know the name of this
profession. Through the conversation, the dialogue, the user gets the machine
to understand exactly what he/she is looking for. There is a joint construction
of a common concept to both interlocutors, and this joint construction is the
point of the dialogue compared to the unique utterance or the computer
language request.
Beyond the information request or the consultation of a database,
installing a dialogue with a machine can also be useful to manage a computer
system, for example digital design software (drawing, image processing, three
dimensional (3D)) or simply a computer's operating system. We can also
imagine that instead of looking for the accurate function in the numerous
menus and submenus of the software in question, the user carries out vocal
commands that are much swifter and more direct, at least if he/she is not
familiar with the software. This second field of application of MMD is close
to that of man-machine interfaces (MMI), and is sometimes defined as
control command dialogue. Including the computer science software
development, we can almost imagine a user who would use the language to
program in natural language [LUZ 95]. Including robotics, this is the field of
robot command, the key application of modern artificial intelligence (AI)
[GOR 11]. Moreover, it is also the field of professional, civil and military
systems whose design I took part in at Thales: air traffic control and
management, maritime surveillance, supervision of the situation on the field
and system command in dangerous areas. These systems are currently
complex MMI and the research team's work in which I participated was to
test the potential of giving them speech. We remained there in the
closed-domain control command dialogue, but with many robustness limits.
Information dialogue, control command dialogue: all the existing systems
will not fall into one or the other of these strict categories. Some systems
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