Language understanding is a key component in a spoken dialogue system. In this paper, we investigate how the language understanding module influences the dialogue system performance by conducting a series of systematic experiments on a task-oriented neural dialogue system in a reinforcement learning based setting. The empirical study shows that among different types of language understanding er...

This paper presents a principled approach to reducing the occurrence of communication failure in spoken language dialogue systems. A set of principles for cooperative human-machine dialogue has been developed based on the development of the dialogue component of a spoken language dialogue system and on human-human dialogue theory. The principles have been tested on the dialogue corpus from a co...

We give the results from an evaluation of the dialogue manager of a developing, Slovenian and Croatian spoken dialogue system for weather-information retrieval. The results are based on two Wizard-of-Oz experiments and the application of the PARADISE evaluation framework. The only difference between both experiment settings is in the dialogue-management manner, i.e., while in the first experime...

In this paper we present results on the learning e ects of using the gulan educational system to understand spoken dialogue systems. The investigation is restricted to the dialogue management component, which uses a subset of the linlin dialogue manager. The results are based on an evaluation of questionnaires given to the students and of tutors assessment of the students knowledge before and a...

This paper describes the component in the SUNDIAL spoken dialogue system responsible for semantic interpretation of user input. This component, thèbelief mod-ule', constructs interpretations using several sources of knowledge, including static knowledge deenitions and a dynamic model of dialogue context, and addresses the problem of the hypothetical nature of the recognition and parsing results...

This paper describes a novel method by which a dialogue agent can learn to choose an optimal dialogue strategy. While it is widely agreed that dialogue strategies should be formulated in terms of communicative intentions, there has been little work on automatically optimizing an agent's choices when there are multiple ways to realize a communicative intention. Our method is based on a combinati...

This study investigated the comparative effects of audio-visually prompted collaborative dialogue on the listening comprehension development of symmetrical, asymmetrical, and asymmetrical teacher-fronted EFL learner groups. Besides, it explored the attitude of the participants of the groups concerning the effectiveness of collaborative dialogue for their listening comprehension improvement. The...

Our approach to speech-based dialogue modelling aims to exploit, in the context of an object-oriented architecture, dialogue processing abilities that are common to many application domains. The coded objects that comprise the system contribute both recognition rules and processing rules (heuristics). A Domain Spotter supports the ability to move between domains and between individual skillsets...

Structured dialogue models are the most commonly used dialogue models in commercial systems, particularly as they are relatively easy to design and re-use. The current paper reports on a study that examined the feasibility of combining more flexible dialogue control with a structured dialogue model. Several systems were built using the RAD (Rapid Application Developer) component of the CSLU too...