Incremental Parsing Models for Dialog Task Structure

In this paper, we present an integrated model of the two central tasks of dialog management: interpreting user actions and generating system actions. We model the interpretation task as a classication problem and the generation task as a prediction problem. These two tasks are interleaved in an incremental parsing-based dialog model. We compare three alternative parsing methods for this dialog model using a corpus of human-human spoken dialog from a catalog ordering domain that has been annotated for dialog acts and task/subtask information. We contrast the amount of context provided by each method and its impact on performance.