Developing a natural language dialogue system: Wizard of Oz studies

Current approaches to the development of natural language dialogue systems do not sufficiently consider the unique qualities of human-computer interaction as distinct from general human communication. Empirical studies are needed for the development of user-friendly interactive systems. One way to achieve this is to use so-called Wizard of Oz method. We describe our experiences in this area. A corpus has been collected consisting of information seeking dialogues in Estonian. We discuss the general structure and linguistic characteristics of the dialogues. Our further aim is to create a computer program which could, while communicating with a user in Estonian, draw up a travel plan.