Un Modelo Para La Especificaci N Ling Stica Y La Gesti N Computacional De Di Logos Hombre-M Quina Mediante Instrucciones Expresadas En Lenguaje Natural

This thesis dissertation, written in Spanish, presents a new model for the linguistic specification and the computational management of man-machine dialogues following commands issued in spoken natural language. Our aim is to design and implement a conversational system for the automatic telephone task scenario, namely Delfos. Voice dialing represents a current trend in research, the purpose of which is to provide functional systems for products ranging from domestic appliances such as a video or a washing machine to more sophisticated environments such as a complete house, with an interface in spoken natural language.

Our system, Delfos, represents a challenge for the fields of Language Engineering and Computational Linguistics as it implies the integration of different technologies such as voice recognition, natural language processing, dialogue management, natural language generation and speech synthesis. The present work belongs to the field of Dialogue Management Systems (DMS), that is, computational systems capable of interpreting natural language. A system with these characteristics manages dialogues between people and machines trying to perform different tasks in a preestablished domain (for instance: travel route planning, bank transactions, phone services, etc.). Research on DMS must be placed in the broader scope of Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Knowledge Engineering. NLP has to do with the formalization and automatization of natural languages. The study of DMS is centered on the analysis of the characteristics of language at the discourse level and which must be taken into account when implementing real and natural systems. Thus, the field of "discourse analysis" and its subfields (pragmatics, dialogue acts, discourse analysis.) represent the starting point in the design and implementation of these kinds of system. Those phenomena characteristic of discourse and conversation such as conversational turns, anaphoras, ellipses silences, repairs, overlappings. are all aspects to be considered by the dialogue management system designer. By doing research in this field we are contributing to the enhancement of our linguistic and computational knowledge of the dialogue for those applications which are a key factor in our present information society. In this sense, and with potential users in mind, we will contribute to improve the use, functionality and success of these information services and products.