Richard: Towards A Dialogue System Supporting Automatic Event Identification

A dialogue system, Richard, for free communication on daily issues is under construction. Daily issues are classified into tree-structured event knowledge-base. For each event topic, we retrieve dialogue examples from the Internet. Basic-level Upper Ontologies (BLUO) are proposed to categorize words of these examples. Event identification is realized by comparing the similarity between BLUOs of an input sentence and BLUOs of example sentences in the event knowledge-base. Cosine similarity algorithm is adopted to select the most possible event domain. BLUOs of an input sentence are combined to the sentence ID. A difference distance acts as a metric to determine the most similar ID in the script with input sentence ID. An example of free dialogue within Greeting-Shopping-Restaurant domains is described. On-going work on meaning-based dialogue system and dialogue-based learning is outlined.