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Learning Dialogue Strategies for Interview Dialogue Systems that Can Engage in Small Talk

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Book cover 9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 579))

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Abstract

This paper proposes a method with which an interview dialogue system can learn user-friendly dialogue strategies. Conventional interview dialogue systems mainly focus on collecting the user’s information and simply repeat questions. We have previously proposed a method for improving user impressions by engaging in small talk during interviews that performs frame-based dialogue management and generates small-talk utterances after the user answers the system’s questions. However, the utterance selection strategy in the method was fixed, making it difficult to give users a good impression of the system. This paper proposes a method for learning strategies for selecting system utterances based on a corpus of dialogues between human users and a text-based interview dialogue system in which each system utterance was evaluated by human annotators. This paper also reports the results of a user study that compared the proposed method with fixed utterance selection strategies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    DeVault et al. developed a virtual human interviewer for automatic assessment of distress indicators [1]. It can generate an utterance after the user answers the system question. This is a kind of small talk, although the objective the system is different from ours, which is to obtain structured information.

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Correspondence to Tomoaki Nakamura .

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Nakamura, T., Kobori, T., Nakano, M. (2019). Learning Dialogue Strategies for Interview Dialogue Systems that Can Engage in Small Talk. In: D'Haro, L., Banchs, R., Li, H. (eds) 9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 579. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9443-0_27

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