TODO: A Core Ontology for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems in Industry 4.0

Nowadays, the demand in industry of dialogue systems to be able to naturally communicate with industrial systems is increasing, as they allow to enhance productivity and security in these scenarios. However, adapting these systems to different use cases is a costly process, due to the complexity of the scenarios and the lack of available data. This work presents the Task-Oriented Dialogue management Ontology (TODO), which aims to provide a core and complete base for semantic-based task-oriented dialogue systems in the context of industrial scenarios in terms of, on the one hand, domain and dialogue modelling and, on the other hand, dialogue management and tracing support. Furthermore, its modular structure, besides grouping specific knowledge in independent components, allows to easily extend each of the modules, attending the necessities of the different use cases. These characteristics allow an easy adaptation of the ontology to different use cases, with a considerable reduction of time and costs. So as to demonstrate the capabilities of the the ontology by integrating it in a task-oriented dialogue system, TODO has been validated in real-world use cases. Finally, an evaluation is also presented, covering different relevant aspects of the ontology.

Modelling Multimodal Dialogues for Social Robots Using Communicative Acts

Social Robots need to communicate in a way that feels natural to humans if they are to effectively bond with the users and provide an engaging interaction. Inline with this natural, effective communication, robots need to perceive and manage multimodal information, both as input and output, and respond accordingly. Consequently, dialogue design is a key factor in creating an engaging multimodal interaction. These dialogues need to be flexible enough to adapt to unforeseen circumstances that arise during the conversation but should also be easy to create, so the development of new applications gets simpler. In this work, we present our approach to dialogue modelling based on basic atomic interaction units called Communicative Acts. They manage basic interactions considering who has the initiative (the robot or the user), and what is his/her intention. The two possible intentions are either ask for information or give information. In addition, because we focus on one-to-one interactions, the initiative can only be taken by the robot or the user. Communicative Acts can be parametrised and combined in a hierarchical manner to fulfil the needs of the robot’s applications, and they have been equipped with built-in functionalities that are in charge of low-level communication tasks. These tasks include communication error handling, turn-taking or user disengagement. This system has been integrated in Mini, a social robot that has been created to assist older adults with cognitive impairment. In a case of use, we demonstrate the operation of our system as well as its performance in real human–robot interactions.