A Statistical User Simulation Technique for the Improvement of a Spoken Dialog System

In this paper, we present a statistical approach for the automatic generation of dialogs by means of a user simulator. This technique can be used to generate dialogs with reduced effort, facilitating the evaluation and improvement of spoken dialog systems. In our approach for user simulation, the user answer is selected taking into account the history of the dialog and the last system turn, as well as the objective(s) set for the dialog. The user model is automatically learned from a training corpus that is labeled in terms of dialog acts. This methodology has been evaluated within the framework of the DIHANA project, whose goal is the design and development of a dialog system to access a railway information system using spontaneous speech in Spanish.

[1]  David Griol,et al.  A stochastic approach for dialog management based on neural networks , 2006, INTERSPEECH.

[2]  Stephanie Seneff,et al.  Dialogue Management in the Mercury Flight Reservation System , 2000 .

[3]  Oliver Lemon,et al.  Learning multi-goal dialogue strategies using reinforcement learning with reduced state-action spaces , 2006, INTERSPEECH.

[4]  Emilio Sanchis,et al.  A dialog system for the DIHANA project , 2006 .

[5]  Rohit Kumar,et al.  Conquestâ - An Open-Source Dialog System for Conferences , 2007, HLT-NAACL.

[6]  Kallirroi Georgila,et al.  User simulation for spoken dialogue systems: learning and evaluation , 2006, INTERSPEECH.

[7]  Encarna Segarra,et al.  Learning of stochastic dialog models through a dialog simulation technique , 2005, INTERSPEECH.

[8]  Steve Young,et al.  Automatic learning of dialogue strategy using dialogue simulation and reinforcement learning , 2002 .

[9]  Victor Zue,et al.  JUPlTER: a telephone-based conversational interface for weather information , 2000, IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process..

[10]  Alexander I. Rudnicky,et al.  Creating natural dialogs in the carnegie mellon communicator system , 1999, EUROSPEECH.

[11]  Lori Lamel,et al.  The LIMSI ARISE system , 2000, Speech Commun..

[12]  Thierry Dutoit,et al.  A probabilistic framework for dialog simulation and optimal strategy learning , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[13]  Emilio Sanchis,et al.  Managing Unseen Situations in a Stochastic Dialog Model , 2006 .

[14]  Steve J. Young,et al.  A survey of statistical user simulation techniques for reinforcement-learning of dialogue management strategies , 2006, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[15]  Marilyn A. Walker,et al.  NJFun- A Reinforcement Learning Spoken Dialogue System , 2000 .

[16]  Wayne H. Ward,et al.  THE CU COMMUNICATOR SYSTEM 1 , 1999 .