Discriminative state tracking for spoken dialog systems

In spoken dialog systems, statistical state tracking aims to improve robustness to speech recognition errors by tracking a posterior distribution over hidden dialog states. Current approaches based on generative or discriminative models have different but important shortcomings that limit their accuracy. In this paper we discuss these limitations and introduce a new approach for discriminative state tracking that overcomes them by leveraging the problem structure. An offline evaluation with dialog data collected from real users shows improvements in both state tracking accuracy and the quality of the posterior probabilities. Features that encode speech recognition error patterns are particularly helpful, and training requires relatively few dialogs.