Problem
Dialogue managers (DMs) are of increasing interest to interface developers, but have not been as useful as they could be. Most existing dialogue managers are not built from existing components; instead, they are knocked together by interface developers without input from linguists. The resulting interfaces are not flexible enough to handle conversations of moderate complexity, multiple modalities, or more than two participants, or to be adapted to new conversational tasks or domains without considerable effort.
Existing dialogue toolkits either focus on the needs of linguists and are difficult to field and evaluate, or focus on the needs of individual developers and provide little or no visibility into what linguistic theories they may embody.
Objective
Our objective with Midiki is to bridge that gap. We want to develop a toolkit that is friendly to linguists, supporting sophisticated behavior while providing full visibility into its internal operations. We are striving to build a toolkit that is agnostic with regard to data distribution method, operating system, programming language, and theory of dialogue. With enough users, we might have a shot at it.
Status
An initial version of the software has been developed, and is being hosted at SourceForge. We appreciate every bit of feedback we can get from actual users. Please don't hesitate to use the tools available from Sourceforge to report bugs, request features, or vent your frustrations (constructively).
- If you download and use Midiki, we would appreciate it if you would let us know. A simple way of doing that is to subscribe to midiki-discussion, the mailing list currently available for Midiki. It is extremely low volume, and there is not yet any market for additional lists.
- If you prefer web forums to mailing lists, please visit the open discussion forum