Some Notes on the Complexity of Dialogues

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we describe some complexity aspects of spoken dialogue. It is shown that, given the internal setting of our dialogue system, it is impossible to test even a small percentage of the theoretically possible utterances in a reasonable amount of time. An even smaller part of possible dialogues can thus be tested. Second, an approach for early testing of the dialogue manager of a dialogue system, without the complete system being put together, is described.