Selecting Help Messages by Using Robust Grammar Verification for Handling Out-of-Grammar Utterances in Spoken Dialogue Systems

We address the issue of out-of-grammar (OOG) utterances in spoken dialogue systems by generating help messages. Help message generation for OOG utterances is a challenge because language understanding based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) of OOG utterances is usually erroneous; important words are often misrecognized or missing from such utterances. Our grammar verification method uses a weighted finite-state transducer, to accurately identify the grammar rule that the user intended to use for the utterance, even if important words are missing from the ASR results. We then use a ranking algorithm, RankBoost, to rank help message candidates in order of likely usefulness. Its features include the grammar verification results and the utterance history representing the user’s experience. key words: spoken dialogue system, help generation, out-of-grammar utterances, novice user, utterance history