Abstract

This paper presents an examination of the Queen’s Communicator, a cross-domain, mixed initiative spoken dialogue system, in terms of the system’s extensibility and reusability. The paper explores how an object-oriented design methodology can be used to define both high-level discourse objects and appropriate forms of relationship between discourse objects. The paper concludes that the application of an object-based approach to dialogue system design makes possible the use of a number of different mechanisms that facilitate the extension and reuse of discourse expertise.