Developing a spoken dialog system is typically timeconsuming, and must often be accomplished using difficult-tolearn professional technologies. Most existing toolkits use statistical semantic parsers and model a dialogue interaction as a finite-state network. However, for developing flexible spoken Chinese dialogue systems, these toolkits have several problems. A new toolkit named the d-Ear SDS...

We explore the use of restricted dialogue contexts in reinforcement learning (RL) of effective dialogue strategies for information seeking spoken dialogue systems (e.g. COMMUNICATOR (Walker et al., 2001)). The contexts we use are richer than previous research in this area, e.g. (Levin and Pieraccini, 1997; Scheffler and Young, 2001; Singh et al., 2002; Pietquin, 2004), which use only slot-based...

Comprehension of spoken natural language is an essential skill for robots to communicate with humans effectively. However, handling unconstrained spoken instructions is challenging due to (1) complex structures and the wide variety of expressions used in spoken language, and (2) inherent ambiguity of human instructions. In this paper, we propose the first comprehensive system for controlling ro...

This paper proposes a new technique to enhance the performance of spoken dialogue systems which presents one novel contribution: the automatic correction of some ASR errors by using language models dependent on dialogue states, in conjunction with grammatical rules. These models are optimally selected by computing similarity scores between patterns obtained from uttered sentences and patterns l...

The Olga project has developed an animated agent interface for information services. The interface combines a graphical interface, spoken dialogue and an animated 3D ‘human-like’ character for multimodal input and output. The interaction is intelligently managed using techniques derived from spoken dialogue but extended for the graphical modality. The Olga agent is innovative in combining a spo...

The paper discusses what kind of generation model is suitable for spoken dialogue responses. We describe different existing models of generation, and compare them from the point of view of spoken dialogue systems. We introduce a model of generation based on new information focus, and argue that this addresses the communicative requirements of flexible spoken dialogue systems (incrementality, im...

In this paper we present an opinion summarization technique in spoken dialogue systems. Opinion mining has been well studied for years, but very few have considered its application in spoken dialogue systems. Review summarization, when applied to real dialogue systems, is much more complicated than pure text-based summarization. We conduct a systematic study on dialogue-system-oriented review a...

This paper presents a novel algorithm for learning parameters in statistical dialogue systems which are modelled as Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). The three main components of a POMDP dialogue manager are a dialogue model representing dialogue state information; a policy which selects the system’s responses based on the inferred state; and a reward function which speci...

This paper proposes a new framework for a spoken dialogue system based on dialogue examples between human subjects and the Wizard of OZ (WOZ) system. Using this framework and a model of information retrieval dialogue, a spoken dialogue system for retrieving shop information while driving in a car has been designed. The system refers to the dialogue examples to find an example that is suitable f...

Although speech and language processing techniques achieved a relative maturity during the last decade, designing a spoken dialogue system is still a tailoring task because of the great variability of factors to take into account. Rapid design and reusability across tasks of previous work is made very difficult. For these reasons, machine learning methods applied to dialogue strategy optimizati...