Related papers: Semantic Processing of Out-Of-Vocabulary Words in …

Evaluation of open-domain dialogue systems is highly challenging and development of better techniques is highlighted time and again as desperately needed. Despite substantial efforts to carry out reliable live evaluation of systems in…

Despite considerable performance improvements, current conversational AI systems often fail to meet user expectations. We discuss several pragmatic limitations of current conversational AI systems. We illustrate pragmatic limitations with…

Stop words, which are considered non-predictive, are often eliminated in natural language processing tasks. However, the definition of uninformative vocabulary is vague, so most algorithms use general knowledge-based stop lists to remove…

Detecting dialogue breakdown in real time is critical for conversational AI systems, because it enables taking corrective action to successfully complete a task. In spoken dialog systems, this breakdown can be caused by a variety of…

The design of dialogue flows is a critical but time-consuming task when developing task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. We propose an approach for the unsupervised discovery of flows from dialogue history, thus making the process…

In domain classification for spoken dialog systems, correct detection of out-of-domain (OOD) utterances is crucial because it reduces confusion and unnecessary interaction costs between users and the systems. Previous work usually utilizes…

In spoken Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems, the choice of the semantic representation describing the users' requests is key to a smooth interaction. Indeed, the system uses this representation to reason over a database and its domain…

Uncertainty plays a central role in spoken dialogue systems. Some stochastic models like Markov decision process (MDP) are used to model the dialogue manager. But the partially observable system state and user intention hinder the natural…

Neural dialog models often lack robustness to anomalous user input and produce inappropriate responses which leads to frustrating user experience. Although there are a set of prior approaches to out-of-domain (OOD) utterance detection, they…

Interactive spoken dialog provides many new challenges for spoken language systems. One of the most critical is the prevalence of speech repairs. This paper presents an algorithm that detects and corrects speech repairs based on finding the…

As a key component in a dialogue system, dialogue state tracking plays an important role. It is very important for dialogue state tracking to deal with the problem of unknown slot values. As far as we known, almost all existing approaches…

Automatic dialogue evaluation plays a crucial role in open-domain dialogue research. Previous works train neural networks with limited annotation for conducting automatic dialogue evaluation, which would naturally affect the evaluation…

Automatically evaluating text-based, non-task-oriented dialogue systems (i.e., `chatbots') remains an open problem. Previous approaches have suffered challenges ranging from poor correlation with human judgment to poor generalization and…

Arguably, omega-regular languages play an important role as a specification formalism in many approaches to systems monitoring via runtime verification. However, since their elements are infinite words, not every omega-regular language can…

There is a growing interest in developing goal-oriented dialog systems which serve users in accomplishing complex tasks through multi-turn conversations. Although many methods are devised to evaluate and improve the performance of…

Language understanding is a key component in a spoken dialogue system. In this paper, we investigate how the language understanding module influences the dialogue system performance by conducting a series of systematic experiments on a…

In this paper, we present a statistical approach for dialogue act processing in the dialogue component of the speech-to-speech translation system \vm. Statistics in dialogue processing is used to predict follow-up dialogue acts. As an…

Evaluating conversational AI systems that use external tools is challenging, as errors can arise from complex interactions among user, agent, and tools. While existing evaluation methods assess either user satisfaction or agents'…

Many studies have proposed methods for optimizing the dialogue performance of an entire pipeline task-oriented dialogue system by jointly training modules in the system using reinforcement learning. However, these methods are limited in…

The NWO Priority Programme Language and Speech Technology is a 5-year research programme aiming at the development of spoken language information systems. In the Programme, two alternative natural language processing (NLP) modules are…