Integration of Statistical Dialog Management Techniques to Implement Commercial Dialog Systems

In this paper we present a proposal to develop commercial dialog systems that avoids the effort of manually defining the dialog strategy for the dialog manager and also takes into account the benefits of using standards like VoiceXML. In our proposal the dialog manager is trained using a labeled dialog corpus, and selects the next system response considering a classification process based on neural networks that takes into account the complete dialog history. Thus, system developers only need to define a set of VoiceXML files, each including a system prompt and the associated grammar to recognize user responses. The statistical dialog model automatically selects the next system prompt.We have applied this technique to develop a dialog system in VoiceXML that provides railway information in Spanish.

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