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:
The entire information that defines a character, e.g. CakeVendor, for the FLoReS system is defined in a set of files sitting in the directory resources/characters/CakeVendor/
This directory contains three sub-directories that parallel the 3 steps defined above:
Authoring the content consists of editing 2 files. One for the user utterances and one for the system utterances. The file that contains the user utterances is basically the training data for the natural language understanding (NLU) module. The system utterance file instead contains the utterances that the character can say.
The NLU module given an utterance returns the most probably identifying strings. It's based on a maximum entropy multiclass classifier and therefore the user utterance file should list utterances maintaining their natural frequency. That is, the best way to obtain these utterances is by running wizard of oz experiments or role plays. Then annotate the data by assigning to each utterance said by a user during these experiments an identifying string. These identifying strings are sometime called speech acts or dialogue acts (in case more domain specific semantic is attached to the basic speech act). Examples of dialogue acts are: question.age to mark all utterances in which the user is asking about the age of the addressee.
The user utterance file is an Excel spreadsheet file with a number of columns:
CakeVendor.zip contains all is required to define a CakeVendor character that is an extension of the character created in this other tutorial.