CoDial

CODIAL is a tutorial and tool in support of cooperative dialogue design for spoken language dialogue systems (SLDSs). The central part is a set of cooperativity guidelines. These guidelines were developed in the course of designing, implementing and testing the dialogue model for the Danish Dialogue System and have later been tested on corpora from other systems.

The target user groups are developers and testers of SLDSs. CODIAL aims to provide its user a solid understanding of cooperative dialogue design and enable him/her to use the guidelines during development and evaluation of an SLDS in order to identify and repair potential as well as actual communication problems and to prevent them from appearing in future dialogues. In support of this work developers and testers using CODIAL should have free access to the requirements and design specifications which will contain information on functionality and usability decisions for the SLDS. CODIAL users should focus on whether the specifications are satisfied by the SLDS and whether the specified system seems to work in practice.

The intended use of CODIAL is as follows:

  1. Take a look at the guidelines to get an idea of what they are about.
  2. Then go through the section on how to use the guidelines as a design guide;
  3. And/or go through the section on how to use the guidelines for diagnostic evaluation.
  4. Try to use the guidelines while you develop an interaction model or analyse a corpus yourself.
  5. If you feel unsure of the use of a guideline then click on a guideline to see examples of its use and/or violations of it.
  6. Repeat any of the above steps until you feel comfortable with the guidelines and their use.

The cooperativity guidelines were developed by Niels Ole Bernsen (NISLab), Hans Dybkjær (PDC) and Laila Dybkjær (NISLab). An early version of some of these web pages was developed by Hans Dybkjær and Laila Dybkjær. A complete version was developed by Laila Dybkjær as part of the DISC project, see CoDial. It was later modified by Hans Dybkjær to be self-contained, some corrections were made, and the woz-corpus was explicitly added. The present version was adapted to fit into this site, but the contents is essentially the same.