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<Paper uid="W02-0209">
  <Title>A Flexible Framework for Developing Mixed-Initiative Dialog Systems</Title>
  <Section position="5" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Discussion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have presented a new framework for developing mixed-initiative dialog systems. This framework, dubbed HOT, enables developers to rapidly develop dialog systems by specifying tasks, their relationships, and relevant domain objects. We are currently implementing this framework as a toolkit and have developed two sample applications in two different modalities.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The new framework departs from other frameworks in the range of functionality that it covers. Its task model triggers not only informational prompts and confirmations, but also customizable responses to task problems of different sorts, such as underspecification. The task relationships modeled are likewise quite rich, including subdialog and inheritance.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Finally, the dialog history provides a generic specification of output semantics, a way to track task status, and uniform access to dialog results of varying complexity. Our future goal is continue to build functionality, especially in NLG, without sacrificing flexibility.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>