That's an excellent questions. I had to solve that a few times for clients. We started with an XML structure quite similar to yours, and now we use JSON. You can see an example here: http://www.branchtrack.com/projects/on029pq6.json or https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11433463/branchtrack/on029pq6.json (prettify it for readability).
Full disclosure: the link above is generated in BranchTrack, an online editor for branching dialogues, and I am the CEO. Feel free to ask anything.