On the Role of Conceptual and Linguistic Ontologies in Spoken Dialogue Systems

Abstract

We report on the role of well-formed conceptual and linguistic ontologies in empirically grounded `spoken dialogue systems' (SDS). In particular we use empirical results from spatial dialogues in German to argue for the strict separation of linguistically motivated knowledge from non-linguistic, domain concerns. We motivate our arguments with a number of examples relevant to the language generation task, and show how a well-defined separation of linguistic and domain concerns can be effected in a practical SDS.