Patal, R., Leuski, A., Traum, D.
In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'06)
(August 21-23, 2006, Marina del Rey)
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We consider the problem of designing virtual characters that support speech-based interactions in a limited domain. Previously we have shown that classification can be an effective and robust tool for selecting appropriate in-domain responses. In this paper, we consider the problem of dealing with out-of-domain user questions. We introduce a taxonomy of out-of-domain response types. We consider three classification architectures for selecting the most appropriate out-of-domain responses. We evaluate these architectures and show that they significantly improve the quality of the response selection making the user?s interaction with the virtual character more natural and engaging.
