Quality-adaptive Spoken Dialogue Initiative Selection And Implications On Reward Modelling

Adapting Spoken Dialogue Systems to the user is supposed to result in more efficient and successful dialogues. In this work, we present an evaluation of a quality-adaptive strategy with a user simulator adapting the dialogue initiative dynamically during the ongoing interaction and show that it outperforms conventional non-adaptive strategies and a random strategy. Furthermore, we indicate a correlation between Interaction Quality and dialogue completion rate, task success rate, and average dialogue length. Finally, we analyze the correlation between task success and interaction quality in more detail identifying the usefulness of interaction quality for modelling the reward of reinforcement learning strategy optimization.