Error Handling in Spoken Dialogue Systems August 28-31, 2003 Château d'Oex, Vaud, Switzerland

On the Utility of Decision-Theoretic Hidden Subdialog

Tim Paek, Eric Horvitz

Microsoft Research Redmond, WA, USA

A spoken dialog system typically characterizes a domain task with multiple states interconnected by actions or thresholds as transitions between states. As the system attempts to solicit a piece of information from the user, it may have to engage in a hidden subdialog, or error handling within a particular state, before transitioning to a new state. Hidden subdialogs generally center on illocutionary repairs such as a request for repetition or confirmation of a heard utterance. We summarize what we believe to be the distinct advantages of representing error handling in a hidden subdialog as decision making under uncertainty. We motivate the discussion with examples drawn from dialog systems built within the Conversational Architectures Project at Microsoft Research.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Paek, Tim / Horvitz, Eric (2003): "On the utility of decision-theoretic hidden subdialog", In EHSD-2003, 95-100.