User Simulation for Dialogue Systems: Learning and Evaluation
Kallirroi Georgila
Date: Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Location:
Host:
This talk focuses on statistical methods for learning models of users interacting with a dialogue system. I will show how dialogue management strategies can be learned through the use of Markov Decision Processes and user simulations. I will discuss several metrics for evaluating user simulation models with respect to how strongly they resemble real user behavior. I will conclude by showing how dialogue strategies learned with the above techniques were incorporated in a spoken dialogue system using the Information State Update approach. Experimental results showed that such learned strategies were superior to hand-crafted ones.