We present how robustness and adaptivity can be supported by the spoken dialogue system architecture. AthosMail is a multilingual spoken dialogue system for e-mail domain. It is being developed in the EU-funded DUMAS project. It has flexible system architecture supporting multiple components for input interpretation, dialogue management and output generation. In addition to language differences...

This thesis focuses on the problem of scalable optimization of dialogue behaviour in speech-based conversational systems using reinforcement learning. Most previous investigations in dialogue strategy learning have proposed flat reinforcement learning methods, which are more suitable for small-scale spoken dialogue systems. This research formulates the problem in terms of Semi-Markov Decision P...

User judgments of Spoken Dialog Systems provide evaluators of such systems with a valid measure of their overall quality. Models for the automatic prediction of user judgments have been built, following the introduction of PARADISE [1]. Main applications are the comparison of systems, the analysis of parameters affecting quality, and the adoption of dialog management strategies. However, a comm...

We present a data-driven model for detecting suitable response locations in the user’s speech. The model has been trained on human–machine dialogue data and implemented and tested in a spoken dialogue system that can perform the Map Task with users. To our knowledge, this is the first example of a dialogue system that uses automatically extracted syntactic, prosodic and contextual features for ...

While multimodal systems are an active research field, there is no agreed-upon set of multimodal interaction parameters, which would allow to quantify the performance of such systems and their underlying modules, and would therefor be necessary for a systematic evaluation. In this paper we propose an extension to established parameters describing the interaction with spoken dialog systems [1] i...

In this paper we argue that approaches to annotate multimodal human face-to-face interaction are not suitable for current device-based human-computer interaction. Instead, existing extensions proposed to established parameters describing the interaction with spoken dialog systems are presented and discussed. A standardization activity for annotating user interactions with multimodal systems is ...

The constant emergence and change of technologies in the form of digital products and services can cause certain groups of the population to feel excluded, older adults represent one such group. We investigate how to combine applied research on computational models of argument and human-centric computing to impact the way in which older adults interact with broadcast debates. This paper describ...

We report on an empirical study of a multiparty turn-taking model for physically situated spoken dialog systems. We present subjective and objective performance measures that show how the model, supported with a basic set of sensory competencies and turn-taking policies, can enable interactions with multiple participants in a collaborative task setting. The analysis brings to the fore several p...