"Abstract actions" and the dialogue server

I've had some productive discussions with Maria over the last few days, which have resulted in a couple of significant improvements to the dialogue server. Maria is going to build a Java GUI for the CALL-SLT system. She needs to be able to send requests to the dialogue server, and get back information that she will pass on to the user. Most often this will be in the form of screen-based output. The new functionality is motivated by this scenario, but is quite generic.

The first point Maria made was that she would prefer to use XML-formatted messages. Java finds it easy to manipulate XML; parsing Prolog messages, on the other hand, is a complete pain. So I added switches that allow the client to put the server into a mode where all messages are XML strings inside a minimal Prolog wrapper.

Yesterday, Maria made another very sensible request. In the first version of the application, the Prolog "output manager" module received abstract actions, and transformed them into concrete actions. Typically, concrete actions would involve printing strings. So, for example, suppose that the system has just given you the prompt

POLITE REQUEST TABLE outside

and you have correctly replied

i would like a table outside please

The abstract action produced is

display_matching_info('i would like a table outside please', correct, [2,1,2])

which means that the recognized words were 'i would like a table outside please'; they correctly matched the prompt; and the score is now 2 correct, 1 incorrect, with a positive streak of 2. This is converted by the output manager into the concrete action

print('I heard: "i would like a table outside please"

Correct!

Score: 2 right, 1 wrong (66.7%) Streak: 2')

This works fine for a text-based command-line interface; but, as Maria pointed out, the output processing isn't necessarily appropriate when you have a Java Swing GUI, in which case you probably would prefer to format it yourself. For instance, you might want to print the recognized words in one pane, render the "correct" as a green tick-mark in another one, and present the score graphically as three columns of different heights.

In general, the abstract action is going to be more useful to you than the concrete one. So I've just added a little more functionality to the dialogue server to handle that too. Here's a summary of the new messages, and what they do; they are also documented in the file itself, $REGULUS/Prolog/dialogue_server.pl.

• action(xml_messages). Format future messages in both directions in XML form. Each message will be of the form
  
  xml_message(XMLString).
  
  where XMLString is an XML encoding of the corresponding Prolog message produced using the predicate prolog_xml/2 in $REGULUS/PrologLib/prolog_xml.pl. The XML can be converted back into Prolog if necessary using the same predicate.
  
• action(prolog_messages). Format future messages in both directions in Prolog form (default).
• action(abstract_actions). Pass abstract actions to the client, so that the client can do its own output management.
  
• action(concrete_actions). Pass concrete actions to the client (default).