Application of Hidden Topic Markov Models on Spoken Dialogue Systems

A common problem in spoken dialogue systems is finding the intention of the user. This problem deals with obtaining one or several topics for each transcribed, possibly noisy, sentence of the user. In this work, we apply the recent unsupervised learning method, Hidden Topic Markov Models (HTMM), for finding the intention of the user in dialogues. This technique combines two methods of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) in order to learn topics of documents. We show that HTMM can be also used for obtaining intentions for the noisy transcribed sentences of the user in spoken dialogue systems. We argue that in this way we can learn possible states in a speech domain which can be used in the design stage of its spoken dialogue system. Furthermore, we discuss that the learned model can be augmented and used in a POMDP (Partially Observable Markov Decision Process) dialogue manager of the spoken dialogue system.

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