Rapidly Developing Dialogue Systems that Support Learning Studies

We describe a dialogue system construction tool that supports the rapid development of dialogue systems for learning applications. Our goals in developing this tool were to provide 1) a plug-and-play type of system that facilitates the integration of new modules and experimentation with different core modules 2) configuration options that effect the behavior of the modules so that the system can be flexibly fine-tuned for a number of learning studies and 3) an authoring language for setting up the domain knowledge and resources needed by the system modules.