User Study of Spoken Decision Support System

This paper presents the results of the user evaluation of spo- ken decision support dialogue systems, which help users select from a set of alternatives. Thus far, we have modeled this deci- sion support dialogue as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and optimized its dialogue strategy to maxi- mize the value of the user’s decision. In this paper, we present a comparative evaluation of the optimized dialogue strategy with several baseline strategies, and demonstrate that the optimized dialogue strategy that was effective in user simulation experi- ments works well in an evaluation by real users.