Conclusion - Man-Machine Dialogue: Design and Challenges - page 185

Conclusion
As Luzzati [LUZ 95, p. 6] already wrote almost 20 years ago, MMD is
still “a new type of communication which has to be invented almost at the
same time as the material that supports it, and whose nature depends on the
abilities that the machine is given, both in understanding mechanisms as well
interaction and generation mechanisms”. We have seen that in spite of the
technical progress and, for example, the increasing use of machine learning
algorithms, the amount of work required to create an MMD system depends
on the abilities that are considered for this system, whether they are the
abilities to process various signals, NLP abilities, the logical reasoning
abilities or the abilities to create and render visual messages. We have
emphasized in this topic the importance of a multidisciplinary method that
integrates experimentation, corpus studies and theory confrontation in their
MMD application. One aspect of this multidisciplinary method, assessment,
is so complex that research efforts have still to be made. We have emphasized
the point of dynamic management of speech turns, the importance of prosody
and semantics (rather than syntax) in the linguistic analysis process, as well as
the key roles of the reference resolution, dialogue acts identification and
planning processes. Through an example that at first appeared to be simple, a
train timetable information task, we have provided a panel of current
techniques and challenges for closed-domain dialogues.
Without analyzing the challenges mentioned in each chapter, let us discuss
the four sets of challenges detailed in section 1.3. The first set of challenges
brings together the theoretical challenges, with the exploration of linguistic
theories and their adaptation to MMD, an adaptation that can happen by
questioning certain historical anchors such as the breakdown into syntax,
semantics and pragmatics. We have emphasized the importance of works
interfacing between two disciplines, with the now self-evident example of the