In this paper, we propose a strategy for designing dialogue managers in spoken dialogue systems for a
restricted domain. This strategy combines several information sources intuition, observation and simulation, in order
to maximize the adaptation within the system capability and the expectation of the user. These sources are combined
by an iterative process consisting of five steps, where different dialogue alternatives are proposed and evaluated
sequentially. The evaluation process includes different measures depending on the information required. Several
measures are proposed and analyzed in each step.We also describe a user-modeling technique and an approach for
designing the confirmation sub-dialogues based on recognition confidence measures. The knowledge-combining
methodology is described and applied to a railway information system. In a subjective evaluation, users from the
university gave the system a 3.9 score on a 5-point scale with an average call duration of 205 seconds. The employers
of the railway company were more critical of the system. They gave it a score of 2.1 even though the system resolved
more than half of the calls (57.8%) within an average call duration of three minutes (185 seconds).
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