User study of the Bayesian update of dialogue state approach to dialogue management

This paper presents the results of a comparative user evaluation of various approaches to dialogue management. The major contribution is a comparison of traditional systems against a system that uses a Bayesian Update of Dialogue State approach. This approach is based on the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), which has previously been shown to give improved robustness in simulation experiments. Results from this paper show that the benefits demonstrated in simulation experiments are also obtained when testing a live system with real users.

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