Interactive Question Answering and Constraint Relaxation in Spoken Dialogue Systems

We explore the relationship between question answering and constraint relaxation in spoken dialog systems. We develop dialogue strategies for selecting and presenting information succinctly. In particular, we describe methods for dealing with the results of database queries in information-seeking dialogs. Our goal is to structure the dialogue in such a way that the user is neither overwhelmed with information nor left uncertain as to how to refine the query further. We present evaluation results obtained from a user study involving 20 subjects in a restaurant selection task.