INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Tackling a Shilly-Shally Classifier for Predicting Task Success in Spoken Dialogue Interaction

Alexander Schmitt, Alexander Zgorzelski, Wolfgang Minker

Universität Ulm, Germany

Statistical models, which predict that a task with a telephone-based Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) is unlikely to be completed, can be useful to adapt dialogue strategies. They can also trigger the decision to route callers directly to human assistance once it is clear that the SDS cannot automate the call. This paper addresses a number of issues that arise when deploying such models. We show that the predictions of a model are subject to strong variations between several adjacent dialogue steps. As a consequence, we show that the accuracy can be significantly risen when using sequences of equal predictions as basis of the decision-making. Furthermore, we implement a confidence metric that takes into account the certainty of the classifier to determine the optimum decision point.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Schmitt, Alexander / Zgorzelski, Alexander / Minker, Wolfgang (2011): "Tackling a shilly-shally classifier for predicting task success in spoken dialogue interaction", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 805-808.