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 experimental system.
The dialogue strategies used by a spoken dialogue system strongly influence performance and user satisfaction. An ideal system would not use a single fixed strategy, but would adapt to the circumstances at hand. To do so, a system must be able to identify dialogue properties that suggest adaptation. This paper focuses on identifying situations where the speech recognizer is performing poorly. We adopt a machine learning approach to learn rules from a dialogue corpus for identifying these situations. Our results show a significant improvement over the baseline and illustrate that both lower-level acoustic features and higher-level dialogue features can affect the performance of the learning algorithm.
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