Evaluating spoken dialogue agents with PARADISE: Two case studies

This paper presents PARADISE PARAdigm for DIalogue Sys tem Evaluation a general framework for evaluating and comparing the performance of spoken dialogue agents The framework decou ples task requirements from an agent s dialogue behaviors supports comparisons among dialogue strategies enables the calculation of per formance over subdialogues and whole dialogues speci es the relative contribution of various factors to performance and makes it possible to compare agents performing di erent tasks by normalizing for task complexity After presenting PARADISE we illustrate its application to two di erent spoken dialogue agents We show how to derive a per formance function for each agent and how to generalize results across agents We then show that once such a performance function has been derived that it can be used both for making predictions about future versions of an agent and as feedback to the agent so that the agent can learn to optimize its behavior based on its experiences with users over time