Designing the dialogue strategy of a spoken dialogue system involves many nontrivial choices. This paper I)resents a reinforcement learning approach for automatically optimizing a dialogue strategy that addresses the technical challenges in applying reinforcement learning to a working dialogue system with hulnan users. \¥e then show that our approach measurably improves performance in an experi...

Holding non-co-located conversations while driving is dangerous (Horrey and Wickens, 2006; Strayer et al., 2006), much more so than conversations with physically present, “situated” interlocutors (Drews et al., 2004). In-car dialogue systems typically resemble non-co-located conversations more, and share their negative impact (Strayer et al., 2013). We implemented and tested a simple strategy f...

This study analyzes user corrections of system errors in the TOOT spoken dialogue system. We find that corrections differ from noncorrections prosodically, in ways consistent with hyperarticulated speech, although many corrections are not hyperarticulated. Yet both are misrecognized more frequently than non-corrections — though no more likely to be rejected by the system. Corrections more dista...

This paper reports experimental results comparing a mixed-initiative to a system-initiative dialogue strategy in the context of a personal voice email agent. To independently test the effects of dialogue strategy and user expertise, users interact with either the system-initiative or the mixed-initiative agent to perform three successive tasks which are identical for both agents. We report perf...

This paper describes a method of generating effective language models for voice query recognition and a new dialogue strategy for a voice activated QA system. By using multiple domain language models, better recognition accuracy is obtained for query utterances. In the proposed interactive dialogue strategy using multimodal user interface, users are requested to indicate correct keywords and in...

This paper introduces a paradigm for designing multimodal dialogue systems. An example system task of the system is to retrieve particular information about different shops in the Tokyo Metropolitan area, such as their names, addresses and phone numbers. The system accepts speech and screen touching as input, and presents retrieved information on a screen display. The speech recognition part is...

This paper proposes and analyzes mathematically an interactive strategy to recover from misrecognition of utterances including multiple information items through a short conversation with a speaker. First the speech recognizer in a dialogue system recognizes an utterance and evaluates the reliability of each item contained in it. The dialogue system accepts only those items of which the reliabi...

Work on argumentation-based dialogue systems often assumes that the adoption of argumentation leads to improved dialogue efficiency and effectiveness. Several studies have taken an experimental approach to prove these alleged benefits, but none has yet supported the expressiveness of a structured argumentation logic. This paper shows how the use of argumentation in deliberation style dialogues ...

Kurzfassung: It has been shown that dialogue systems benefit from incremental architectures to produce fast responses and to interact with the interlocutor in a more human-like way. The advantage of quick responses yields the disadvantage of running out of things to say for a while. In such occasions, humans tend to produce disfluencies as a listener-oriented strategy to signal the ongoing prod...