An easy method to make dialogue systems incremental

Incrementality as a way of managing the interactions between a dialogue system and its users has been shown to have concrete advantages over the traditional turn-taking frame. Incremental systems are more reactive, more human-like, offer a better user experience and allow the user to correct errors faster, hence avoiding desynchronisations. Several incremental models have been proposed, however, their core underlying architecture is different from the classical dialogue systems. As a result, they have to be implemented from scratch. In this paper, we propose a method to transform traditional dialogue systems into incremental ones. A new module, called the Scheduler is inserted between the client and the service so that from the client’s point of view, the system behaves incrementally, even though the service does not.