A spoken dialog system (SDS) is a computer system which supports human-computer conversations in specific knowledge domains. It integrates technologies including speech recognition, natural language understanding, dialog modeling, language generation, and textto-speech synthesis. Advances in speech and language technologies have made SDS an important research area and have brought about systems...

This document defines a Media Control Channel Framework Package for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) dialog interaction on media connections and conferences. The package defines dialog management request elements for preparing, starting, and terminating dialog interactions, as well as associated responses and notifications. Dialog interactions are specified in a dialog language. This package de...

Spoken dialog tasks incur many errors including speech recognition errors, understanding errors, and even dialog management errors. These errors create a big gap between the user’s intention and the system’s understanding, which eventually results in a misinterpretation. To fill in the gap, people in human-to-human dialogs try to clarify the major causes of the misunderstanding to selectively c...

In this paper, we present a statistical approach for the development of a dialog manager and for learning optimal dialog strategies. This methodology is based on a classification procedure that considers all of the previous history of the dialog to select the next system answer. To evaluate the performance of the dialog system, the statistical approach for dialog management has been extended to...

AI dialog systems are now developing from question-answering systems toward advising systems. This includes: discussed here, but see (Jameson, Wahlster 1982). The second part o f this paper presents user modelling with respect to a dialog strategy which selects and verbalizes the appropriate speech act of recommendation. structuring dialog understanding and generating a wider range o f speech a...

We present an approach for enriching dialog based textto-speech (TTS) synthesis systems by explicitly controlling the expressiveness through the use of dialog act tags. The dialog act tags in our framework are automatically obtained by training a maximum entropy classifier on the Switchboard-DAMSL data set, unrelated to the TTS database. We compare the voice quality produced by exploiting autom...

AutoTutor is an automated computer literacy tutor that participates in a conversation with the student. AutoTutor simulates the discourse patterns and pedagogical dialog moves of human tutors. This paper describes how the Dialog Advancer Network (DAN) manages AutoTutor’s conversations and how AutoTutor generates pedagogically effective dialog moves that are sensitive to the quality and nature o...

This paper describes a user simulator based on analysis of VoiceXML description. A user simulator is a method to evaluate a spoken dialog system without the use of human evaluators. The new feature of our simulator is that it uses a VoiceXML description that describes the dialog system’s behavior. By using the VoiceXML description, the proposed simulator can be used for any dialog system that w...

In this paper, we present a technique for learning optimal dialog management strategies. An automatic dialog generation technique, including a simulation of the communication channel, has been developed to acquire the required data, train dialog models, and explore new dialog strategies in order to learn the optimal one. A set of quantitative and qualitative measures has been defined to evaluat...