This book addresses the dialog issues that must be resolved in building effective spoken natural language dialog systems, systems where both the human and computer interact via spoken natural language. The authors present a theoretical and practical architecture for this system as well as experimental results to support the system.

As spoken natural language dialog systems technology continues to make great strides, numerous issues regarding dialog processing still need to be resolved. This book presents an exciting new dialog processing architecture that allows for a number of behaviors required for effective human-machine interactions, including: problem-solving to help the user carry out a task, coherent subdialog movement during the problem-solving process, user model usage, expectation usage for contextual interpretation and error correction, and variable initiative behavior for interacting with users of differing expertise. The book also details how different dialog problems in processing can be handled simultaneously, and provides instructions and in-depth result from pertinent experiments. Researchers and professionals in natural language systems will find this important new book an invaluable addition to their libraries.

The system described in the book is impressive as one of a small number of complete and working spoken natural language dialogue systems that have been developed... many of the techniques in the book are interesting and well thought out, and should prompt useful discussion and further work. I would therefore recommend it to those working in computational linguistics who are concerned with practical issues. The Computer Journal