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Modern virtual personal assistants provide a convenient interface for completing daily tasks via voice commands. An important consideration for these assistants is the ability to recover from automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural…
We present a methodology to systematically test conversational recommender systems with regards to conversational breakdowns. It involves examining conversations generated between the system and simulated users for a set of pre-defined…
Recognition errors are common in human communication. Similar errors often lead to unwanted behaviour in dialogue systems or virtual assistants. In human communication, we can recover from them by repeating misrecognized words or phrases;…
User simulation is a promising approach for automatically training and evaluating conversational information access agents, enabling the generation of synthetic dialogues and facilitating reproducible experiments at scale. However, the…
Many studies have applied reinforcement learning to train a dialog policy and show great promise these years. One common approach is to employ a user simulator to obtain a large number of simulated user experiences for reinforcement…
User simulation has been a cost-effective technique for evaluating conversational recommender systems. However, building a human-like simulator is still an open challenge. In this work, we focus on how users reformulate their utterances…
Goal-oriented dialog systems enable users to complete specific goals like requesting information about a movie or booking a ticket. Typically the dialog system pipeline contains multiple ML models, including natural language understanding,…
This paper presents a novel application of large language models in user simulation for task-oriented dialog systems, specifically focusing on an in-context learning approach. By harnessing the power of these models, the proposed approach…
Despite widespread interests in reinforcement-learning for task-oriented dialogue systems, several obstacles can frustrate research and development progress. First, reinforcement learners typically require interaction with the environment,…
Speech-based virtual assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Google assistant, and Apple Siri, typically convert users' audio signals to text data through automatic speech recognition (ASR) and feed the text to downstream dialog models for…
Conversational search has seen increased recent attention in both the IR and NLP communities. It seeks to clarify and solve users' search needs through multi-turn natural language interactions. However, most existing systems are trained and…
Many businesses and consumers are extending the capabilities of voice-based services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri to create custom voice experiences (also known as skills). As the number of these…
The performance of a task-completion dialogue agent usually affects the user experience: when the conversation system yields an unreasonable response, users may feel dissatisfied. Besides, early termination often occurs in disappointing…
User simulators are essential for training reinforcement learning (RL) based dialog models. The performance of the simulator directly impacts the RL policy. However, building a good user simulator that models real user behaviors is…
Existing user simulators (USs) for task-oriented dialogue systems only model user behaviour on semantic and natural language levels without considering the user persona and emotions. Optimising dialogue systems with generic user policies,…
In this paper, we describe a set of metrics for the evaluation of different dialogue management strategies in an implemented real-time spoken language system. The set of metrics we propose offers useful insights in evaluating how particular…
A learning dialogue agent can infer its behaviour from interactions with the users. These interactions can be taken from either human-to-human or human-machine conversations. However, human interactions are scarce and costly, making…
Conversational information access is an emerging research area. Currently, human evaluation is used for end-to-end system evaluation, which is both very time and resource intensive at scale, and thus becomes a bottleneck of progress. As an…
Objective: This paper introduces a patient simulator for scalable, automated evaluation of healthcare conversational agents, generating realistic, controllable interactions that systematically vary across medical, linguistic, and behavioral…
Dialogue policy learning for task-oriented dialogue systems has enjoyed great progress recently mostly through employing reinforcement learning methods. However, these approaches have become very sophisticated. It is time to re-evaluate it.…