An efficient dialogue control method under system²s limited knowledge

This paper presents a novel method that controls a dialogue between a spoken dialogue system and a user efficiently so that the system responds as helpfully as possible within the limits of its knowledge. Due to speech recognition errors, a system and user must engage in a “confirmation dialogue” to clarify a user’s request. Although a confirmation dialogue is unavoidable, it should be as concise as possible. Previous methods do not sufficiently allow for the effect of the limits of the system’s knowledge on the efficiency of dialogue. The result is unnecessarily long dialogues to confirm a user’s request minutely even if the request is beyond the system’s knowledge. This paper describes a method that controls a dialogue efficiently so as to avoid an unnecessary confirmation dialogue and presents a computational efficiency criterion for dialogue control within the limits of the system’s knowledge.