Conquest: an open-source dialog system for conferences

We describe ConQuest, an open-source, reusable spoken dialog system that provides technical program information during conferences. The system uses a transparent, modular and open infrastructure, and aims to enable applied research in spoken language interfaces. The conference domain is a good platform for applied research since it permits periodical redeployments and evaluations with a real user-base. In this paper, we describe the system's functionality, overall architecture, and we discuss two initial deployments.