Major changes in OpenDial version 1.x
- Upgrade to Java 8 (which is required to compile and run the toolkit).
- Major refactoring of the internal code base and efficiency improvements in the inference algorithms. For example, the sampling algorithm can now take full advantage of multi-core architectures.
- Support for Nuance cloud-based speech recognition and synthesis via the NuanceSpeech plugin.
- Support for data-driven dependency parsing with a new module bridging OpenDial to the MaltParser.
- Ability to connect two remote instances of OpenDial via the Connect to Remote Client functionality. This can notably be used to conduct Wizard-of-Oz experiment, as explained in the section Data collection. It can also be used to develop distributed dialogue architectures.
- Basic support for incremental processing via the addIncrementalContent method in DialogueSystem.
- The pattern matching functionalities used in the rule conditions have been extended to capture optional or alternative elements. For instance, the condition <if var="u_u" relation="contains" value="one (big|small)? object"/> will match strings such as "one big object", "one small object" or "one object". Such patterns can be very useful for natural language understanding models.
- Probabilistic rules can now be associated with a particular priority level (via the priority attribute in the XML specification), allowing them to supercede one another.
- Inclusion of a text-only interface (which can be used to run OpenDial in terminals without support for X11 forwarding).
- Removal of the Load modules functionality in the GUI.
- Inclusion of a new, extended example of dialogue domain: the flight-booking domain.