CAML – A Universal Configuration Language for Dialogue Systems

Abstract

In this paper, a novel architecture of a universal dialogue system and its configuration language, so-called Conversational Agent Markup Language (CAML), is proposed. The dialogue system embodies a CLIPS engine in order to enable CAML to formulate procedural and heuristic knowledge. CAML supports frames, functions, and categories that enable it: (a) to process wildcards, to control the inner state through variables, and to formulate procedural knowledge in contrast to Phoenix/CAT Dialog Manager; (b) to support nested macros, to control the inner state through variables, to assign priorities and weights to states, and to interface with external databases in contrast to Dialog Management Tool Language (DMTL); (c) to implement context-free grammars, to extract semantic content from user input through frames, to allow numeric variables, and to interface with external databases as opposed to Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML). The proposed system is extensible in the sense that it can be embedded in any conversational system that receives and emits XML content. Such a dialogue system can be incorporated in multimodal interfaces, such as talking head applications, conversational web interfaces, conversational database interfaces, and conversational programming interfaces.