Introduction

the process of creating a character is iterative in nature. The following steps create an initial character that will probably need to be refined by repeating the steps as required to obtain the desired behavior.

Three actions are required to create the content necessary to drive the natural language component:

1. Create an initial set of system and user utterances. Each utterance needs to be associated to an identifying string (like a name) and the natural language understanding and dialogue management modules will use these identifiers instead of the real utterances.
2. Create a dialogue policy. This policy consists of:
   
   1. the set of variables that constitute the dialogue state (the dialogue manager is an information based one. That is it decides what to say based on what the user said and the current state of the conversation as represented in the dialogue state (also called information state)).
   2. the set of sub-dialogue networks. These sub-dialogues are similar to planning operators, with preconditions and effects. The dialogue manager (DM), will select one based on what the user said and the current dialogue state. Each sub-dialogue typically carries out a short portion of an entire dialogue (e.g. the greeting phase, or answering a question).
3. Train the natural language understanding module to map a given utterance to one of the known identifying strings defined in the first step.

Step 1: Authoring the content