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Abstract

A method and apparatus for enabling a mixed initiative dialog to be carried out between a user and a machine are described. A speech-enabled processing system receives an utterance from the user, and the utterance is recognized by an automatic speech recognizer using a set of statistical language models. Prior to parsing the utterance, a dialog manager uses a semantic frame to identify the set of all slots potentially associated with the current task and then retrieves a corresponding grammar for each of the identified slots from an associated reusable dialog component. A natural language parser then parses the utterance using the recognized speech and all of the retrieved grammars. The dialog manager then identifies any slot which remains unfilled after parsing and causes a prompt to be played to the user for information to fill the unfilled slot. Dependencies and constraints may be associated with particular slots.

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First Claim