A Dialogue System for Telugu, a Resource-Poor Language

A dialogue system is a computer system which is designed to converse with human beings in natural language (NL). A lot of work has been done to develop dialogue systems in regional languages. This paper presents an approach to build a dialogue system for resource poor languages. The approach comprises of two parts namely Data Management and Query Processing. Data Management deals with storing the data in a particular format which helps in easy and quick retrieval of requested information. Query Processing deals with producing a relevant system response for a user query. Our model can handle code-mixed queries which are very common in Indian languages and also handles context which is a major challenge in dialogue systems. It also handles spelling mistakes and a few grammatical errors. The model is domain and language independent. As there is no automated evaluation tool available for dialogue systems we went for human evaluation of our system, which was developed for Telugu language over ‘Tourist places of Hyderabad’ domain. 5 people evaluated our system and the results are reported in the paper.