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Related papers: Metaphorical User Simulators for Evaluating Task-o…

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User Simulators play a pivotal role in training and evaluating task-oriented dialogue systems. Traditional user simulators typically rely on human-engineered agendas, resulting in generated responses that often lack diversity and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Xiang Luo , Zhiwen Tang , Jin Wang , Xuejie Zhang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Silvia Terragni , Modestas Filipavicius , Nghia Khau , Bruna Guedes , André Manso , Roland Mathis

Towards human-like dialogue systems, current emotional dialogue approaches jointly model emotion and semantics with a unified neural network. This strategy tends to generate safe responses due to the mutual restriction between emotion and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-02 Yushan Qian , Bo Wang , Shangzhao Ma , Wu Bin , Shuo Zhang , Dongming Zhao , Kun Huang , Yuexian Hou

Dialogue policy optimisation via reinforcement learning requires a large number of training interactions, which makes learning with real users time consuming and expensive. Many set-ups therefore rely on a user simulator instead of humans.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Hsien-chin Lin , Nurul Lubis , Songbo Hu , Carel van Niekerk , Christian Geishauser , Michael Heck , Shutong Feng , Milica Gašić

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) increasingly rely on user simulators for automated evaluation of sales agents. A key requirement for such simulators is the ability to model human decision-making. However, most existing simulation…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yuan-Chi Li , Li-Chi Chen , Sung-Yi Wu , Yu-Che Tsai , Shou-De Lin

User Simulators are one of the major tools that enable offline training of task-oriented dialogue systems. For this task the Agenda-Based User Simulator (ABUS) is often used. The ABUS is based on hand-crafted rules and its output is in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-05-21 Florian Kreyssig , Inigo Casanueva , Pawel Budzianowski , Milica Gasic

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Nolwenn Bernard , Krisztian Balog

Task-oriented dialogue systems aim to fulfill user goals through natural language interactions. They are ideally evaluated with human users, which however is unattainable to do at every iteration of the development phase. Simulated users…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-05 Nurul Lubis , Christian Geishauser , Hsien-Chin Lin , Carel van Niekerk , Michael Heck , Shutong Feng , Milica Gašić

To train a statistical spoken dialogue system (SDS) it is essential that an accurate method for measuring task success is available. To date training has relied on presenting a task to either simulated or paid users and inferring the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-08-17 Pei-Hao Su , David Vandyke , Milica Gasic , Dongho Kim , Nikola Mrksic , Tsung-Hsien Wen , Steve Young

End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue Systems (TDSs) have attracted a lot of attention for their superiority (e.g., in terms of global optimization) over pipeline modularized TDSs. Previous studies on end-to-end TDSs use a single-module model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-07-12 Jiahuan Pei , Pengjie Ren , Maarten de Rijke

Research and development on conversational recommender systems (CRSs) critically depends on sound and reliable evaluation methodologies. However, the interactive nature of these systems poses significant challenges for automatic evaluation.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Nolwenn Bernard , Krisztian Balog

In this work, we present a hybrid learning method for training task-oriented dialogue systems through online user interactions. Popular methods for learning task-oriented dialogues include applying reinforcement learning with user feedback…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-04-19 Bing Liu , Gokhan Tur , Dilek Hakkani-Tur , Pararth Shah , Larry Heck

This review gives an extensive overview of evaluation methods for task-oriented dialogue systems, paying special attention to practical applications of dialogue systems, for example for customer service. The review (1) provides an overview…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Anouck Braggaar , Christine Liebrecht , Emiel van Miltenburg , Emiel Krahmer

User simulation is essential for generating enough data to train a statistical spoken dialogue system. Previous models for user simulation suffer from several drawbacks, such as the inability to take dialogue history into account, the need…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-07-04 Layla El Asri , Jing He , Kaheer Suleman

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.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Ziming Li , Julia Kiseleva , Maarten de Rijke

Task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems are designed to help users achieve specific goals through natural language interaction. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved linguistic fluency and contextual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Shutong Feng , Hsien-chin Lin , Nurul Lubis , Carel van Niekerk , Michael Heck , Benjamin Ruppik , Renato Vukovic , Milica Gašić

Task-oriented dialogue systems (TODS) are continuing to rise in popularity as various industries find ways to effectively harness their capabilities, saving both time and money. However, even state-of-the-art TODS are not yet reaching their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-07 Ryan Fellows , Hisham Ihshaish , Steve Battle , Ciaran Haines , Peter Mayhew , J. Ignacio Deza

Embodied agents designed to assist users with tasks must engage in natural language interactions, interpret instructions, execute actions, and communicate effectively to resolve issues. However, collecting large-scale, diverse datasets of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Daniel Philipov , Vardhan Dongre , Gokhan Tur , Dilek Hakkani-Tür

Information access systems, such as search engines, recommender systems, and conversational assistants, have become integral to our daily lives as they help us satisfy our information needs. However, evaluating the effectiveness of these…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Krisztian Balog , ChengXiang Zhai

With the advances in deep learning, tremendous progress has been made with chit-chat dialogue systems and task-oriented dialogue systems. However, these two systems are often tackled separately in current methods. To achieve more natural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-18 Xinyan Zhao , Bin He , Yasheng Wang , Yitong Li , Fei Mi , Yajiao Liu , Xin Jiang , Qun Liu , Huanhuan Chen