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<Paper uid="H91-1070">
  <Title>Interactive Problem Solving and Dialogue in the ATIS Domain 1</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="357" end_page="357" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
SUMMARY
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper describes our current model for discourse and dialogue within the ATIS system. Heavy emphasis has been placed on the specific goal-directed task of making flight reservations. This is in part because we believe that this particular capability represents the most useful possible outcome of our efforts in developing a system based on the Official Airline Guide, potentially reaching a large population of users with no prior expert training. But in part this choice was also made because it offers a very well-defined goal with a number of well-defined subgoals, ideally suited for exploring issues in interactive human/computer dialogues. The task is nontrivial, but the potential pay-off is large, both in terms of reducing the complexity of the recognition task and improving user satisfaction. We believe that it would be particularly worthwhile to narrow down the ATIS system to be focused only on making flight reservations, discarding, for example, all references to ground transportation and questions probing the database for other types of information, such as capacity of aircraft, wingspan, etc. If we can demonstrate a system that actually works with speech input and speech/text/tables as output, then such a system should stand as a convincing demonstration of the utility of spoken language systems.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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