MDWOZ: A Wizard of Oz Environment for Dialog Systems Development

This paper describes MDWOZ, a development environment for spoken dialog systems based on the Wizard of Oz technique, whose main goal is to facilitate data collection (speech signal and dialog related information) and interaction model building. Both these tasks can be quite difficult, and such an environment can facilitate them very much. Due to the modular way in which MDWOZ was implemented, it is possible to reuse parts of it in the final dialog system. The environment provides language-transparent facilities and accessible methods such that even non-computing specialists can participate in spoken dialog systems development. The main features of the environment are presented, together with some test experiments.