Middleware for Incremental Processing in Conversational Agents

David Schlangen1,  Timo Baumann1,  Hendrik Buschmeier2,  Okko Buß1,  Stefan Kopp2,  Gabriel Skantze3,  Ramin Yaghoubzadeh2
1University of Potsdam, Germany, 2Bielefeld University, 3KTH, Stockholm


Abstract

We describe work done at three sites on designing conversational agents capable of incremental processing. We focus on the ‘middleware’ layer in these systems, which takes care of passing around and maintaining incremental information between the modules of such agents. All implementations are based on the abstract model of incremental dialogue processing proposed by Schlangen and Skantze (2009), and the paper shows what different instantiations of the model can look like given specific requirements and application areas.