The development of task-oriented spoken language dialog system requires expertise in multiple domains including speech recognition, natural spoken language understanding and generation, dialog management and speech synthesis. The dialog manager is the core of a spoken language dialog system, and makes use of multiple knowledge sources. In this contribution we report on our methodology for devel...

We present a dialog model for identifying persons, learning person names, and associated face IDs in a receptionist dialog. The proposed model allows a decomposition of the main dialog task into separate dialog behaviors which can be implemented separately and allow a mixture of handcrafted models and dialog strategies trained with reinforcement learning. The dialog model was implemented on our...

This paper presents an approach to extraction of dialog acts and topics from utterances in a spoken dialog system. Two knowledge sources are used to describe the dialog history. One is a transition network of dialog acts and the other is a tree of topics which might appear in domain communications. Dialog acts and topics are extracted through bottom-up and top-down analyses. Bottom-up candidate...

This paper presents an evaluation of a spoken dialog system for automotive environments. Our overall goal was to measure the impact of user-system interaction on the user’s driving performance, and to determine whether adding context-awareness to the dialog system might reduce the degree of user distraction during driving. To address this issue, we incorporated context-awareness into a spoken d...

In persuasion dialogs, agents exchange arguments on a subject on which they disagree. Thus, each agent tries to persuade the others to change their minds. Several systems, grounded on argumentation theory, have been proposed in the literature for modeling persuasion dialogs. It is important to be able to analyze the quality of these dialogs. Hence, quality criteria have to be defined in order t...

This document defines the taxonomy of dialog acts that are necessary to encode domain-independent dialog moves in the context of a task-oriented, open-domain dialog. Such taxonomy is formulated to satisfy two complementary requirements: on the one hand, domain independence, i.e. the power to cover all the range of possible interactions in any type of conversation (particularly conversation orie...

In a spoken dialog system, dialog state tracking deduces information about the user’s goal as the dialog progresses, synthesizing evidence such as dialog acts over multiple turns with external data sources. Recent approaches have been shown to overcome ASR and SLU errors in some applications. However, there are currently no common testbeds or evaluation measures for this task, hampering progres...

To construct an expandable and adaptable dialog system which handles multiple tasks, we proposed a dialog system using a weighted finite-state transducer (WFST) in which users concept and system action tags are input and output of the transducer, respectively. To test the potential of the WFSTbased dialog management (DM) platform using statistical DM models, we constructed a dialog system using...

This paper presents an approach to processing of ambiguous requests in spoken dialogs in information train timetable service systems. The main problem of human-machine interaction is in the fact, that speaking human does not express some essential information, because it results from the receiver’s knowledge and the dialog context. Therefore the real understanding system have to combine the inc...

In this paper, a single metric, which we will call the figure of merit , for the quantitative analysis and comparison of spoken dialog systems is introduced. This figure of merit is the product of the weighted dialog accuracy (expressed as the rate of success) and the weighted dialog efficiency (expressed as the average number of concepts per turn). Actually, it is highly desirable to have a qu...