Minimally invasive surgery for spoken dialog systems

We demonstrate three techniques (Escalator, Engager, and EverywhereContender) designed to optimize performance of commercial spoken dialog systems. These techniques have in common that they produce very small or no negative performance impact even during a potential experimental phase. This is because they can either be applied offline to data collected on a deployed system, or they can be incorporated conservatively such that only a low percentage of calls will get affected until the optimal strategy becomes apparent.