Spoken Language Dialog System Development and Evaluation at LIMSI

The development of natural spoken language dialog systems requires expertise in multiple domains, including speech recognition, natural spoken language understanding and generation, dialog managment and speech synthesis. In this paper I report on our experience at LIMSI in the design, development and evaluation of spoken language dialog systems for information retrieval tasks. Drawing upon our experience in this area, I attempt to highlight some aspects of the design process, such as the use of general and task-specific knowledge sources, the need for an iterative development cycle, and some of the difficulties related to evaluation of development progress.