Soft Computing Models for the Development of Commercial Conversational Agents

Proceedings of: 6th International Conference on Soft Computing Models in Industrial and Environmental Applications (SOCO 2011). Salamanca, April 6-8, 2011 In this paper we present a proposal for the development of conversational agents that, on the one hand, takes into account the benefits of using standards like VoiceXML, whilst on the other, includes a module with a soft computing model that avoids the effort of manually defining the dialog strategy. This module is trained using a labeled dialog corpus, and selects the next system response considering a classification process based on neural networks that takes into account the dialog history. Thus, system developers only need to define a set of VoiceXML files, each including a system prompt and the associated grammar to recognize the users responses to the prompt. We have applied this technique to develop a conversational agent in VoiceXML that provides railway information in Spanish. Funded by projects CICYT TIN2008-06742-C02-02/TSI, CICYT TEC2008-06732-C02- 02/TEC, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485), and DPS2008-07029-C02-02. Publicado