1. A human-machine dialogue system having a plurality of computer-implemented dialogue components comprising: a user client for delivering output prompts to a human user and receiving dialogue inputs from the human user including speech inputs; an automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine in communication with the user client for processing the speech inputs to determine corresponding sequences of representative text words; a natural language understanding (NLU) engine in communication with the ASR engine for processing the text words to determine corresponding semantic interpretations; and a dialogue manager (DM) in communication with the user client and the NLU engine for generating the output prompts and responding to the semantic interpretations so as to manage a dialogue process with the human user; wherein the dialogue components share context information with each other using a common context sharing mechanism such that the operation of each dialogue component reflects available context information.