BCORN Generic Dialogue Management

BCORN is a generic dialog strategy with domain and task-independent  conventional, information-providing and recommendation capabilities.  BCORN is an ambitious project aiming at developing a model for  dialogue management able to handle the dialogue in any natural  language interaction for any application.
The first version of BCORN is limited to conversational recommender  systems and an instance of such a system, CoreSong, has been  developed in the application domain of preference-based music  recommendation.
BCORN is inspired by the work on a  subsumption architecture for  building intelligent creatures , as advocated by Rodney Brooks 1991.  The BCORN model is constructed using dialog behaviors that each corresponds to a natural chunk of an agent¡Çs dialog strategy.  Some dialog behaviors are  general (e.g. a conventional dialog  behavior of greeting and farewell), and some are specific (e.g. a  recommendation or preference interview behaviour). A generic task and  domain-independent dialog agent thus needs a dialog model that  includes dialog behaviors that can co-exist but at the same time have  a clear order of priority. It is also imperative that the model  adjusts to the needs of different back-end resources at hand in a particular application.
Similar to the  model proposed by Brooks, BCORN is constructed using  state automata---called dialog behavior diagrams (DBD).  The DBDs  express dialog behaviors of the dialog agent that are both natural  conceptually and efficient computational mechanisms. The complete  dialog strategy of the agent is the result of running several DBDs in  parallel in a DBD strata machine, leading to an emergent coherent and  flexible agent behavior.