The past year has witnessed the revival of spoken dialogue systems, which are becoming multi-domain and ubiquitous. In this context, the problem of efficient scripting of dialogues is becoming increasingly important. As of today, statistical approaches to dialogue control are not yet feasible; the problem remains quite firmly one of manual coding. This paper describes a programming language we christened ClippyScript, which is aimed at rapid manual scripting of multi-domain dialogue systems. Only four main keywords - MODULE, SLOTS, GRAMMAR, and ACTIONS - plus a concept of focus provide the necessary abstractions for language understanding, dynamic grammars, hierarchical slot filling, multiple domains, access to data services, and performing of the dialogue goal. The languagefs expressive power is boosted by the ability of embedding code snippets in a high-level programming language (C#).

Index Terms: spoken dialogue systems, scripting languages