A Grammar Formalism for Specifying ISU-Based Dialogue Systems

We describe how to give a full specification of an ISU-based dialogue system as a grammar. For this we use Grammatical Framework (GF), which separates grammars into abstract and concrete syntax. All components necessary for a working GoDiS dialogue system are specified in the abstract syntax, while the linguistic details are defined in the concrete syntax. Since GF is a multilingual grammar formalism, it is straightforward to extend the dialogue system to several languages. Furthermore, the GF Resource Grammar Library can be used to write a single concrete instance covering 13 different languages.