title: Adaptable dialog architecture and runtime engine (AdaRTE): a framework for rapid prototyping of health dialog systems.
abstract: Spoken dialog systems have been increasingly employed to provide ubiquitous access via telephone to information and services for the non-Internet-connected public. They have been successfully applied in the health care context; however, speech technology requires a considerable development investment. The advent of VoiceXML reduced the proliferation of incompatible dialog formalisms, at the expense of adding even more complexity. This paper introduces a novel architecture for dialogue representation and interpretation, AdaRTE, which allows developers to lay out dialog interactions through a high-level formalism, offering both declarative and procedural features. AdaRTE's aim is to provide a ground for deploying complex and adaptable dialogs whilst allowing experimentation and incremental adoption of innovative speech technologies. It enhances augmented transition networks with dynamic behavior, and drives multiple back-end realizers, including VoiceXML. It has been especially targeted to the health care context, because of the great scale and the need for reducing the barrier to a widespread adoption of dialog systems.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Biomedical Informatics, Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Pavia, Via Ferrata 1, I-27100 Pavia, Italy. linamaria.rojas@unipv.it
authors.forename: L M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Rojas-Barahona
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Giorgino
mesh_terms: D022126:Access to Information; D007256:Information Systems; D013060:Speech