Ritel: an open-domain, human-computer dialog system

The project RITEL aims at integrating a spoken language dialog system and an open-domain question answering system to allow a human to ask general questions ("Who is currently presiding the Senate?") and refine the search interactively. As this point in time the RITEL platform is being used to collect a human-computer dialog corpus. The user can receive factual answers to some questions ( Q: who is the president of France, R: Jacques Chirac is the president for France since may 1995). This paper briefly presents the current system, the collected corpus, the problems encountered by such a system and our first answers to these problems. When the system is more advance, it will allow measuring the net worth of integrating a dialog system into a QA system. Does allowing such a dialog really enables to reach faster and more precisely the "right" answer to a question?