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However, this approach has its limitations. Q: What do you see as the differences between developing chatbots and techniques for creating speech-based dialogs? She has over 15 years of experience on the front lines of the speech industry, in the design, usability, and tuning disciplines.
Get SpeechTech eWeekly in your inbox - Sign up for free. In this talk I will outline the capabilities of current conversational interfaces and assess the extent to which they model important conversational phenomena such as follow-up questions, changes of topic, out-of-scope utterances, and mixed-initiative dialogue.
Generally conversational interfaces are categorised as either task-oriented, for example, to assist with making a hotel booking, or as entertainment-based, for example, to engage in chit-chat. However, another category of conversational interface is emerging in which the assistant takes part in a conversation in order to solve a problem, for example, to provide support and advice in a healthcare context. I will discuss the technical and other challenges we face in developing this new type of conversational interface.
Practical requirements for dialogue systems, such as robustness, scalability and portability will also be discussed and exemplified from the point of view of performance evaluation and usability. The tutorial is targeted at researchers and system developers who wish to learn more about theoretical and practical issues concerning development and evaluation of spoken dialogue systems.
The tutorial will consist of two parts. The first part will survey techniques in spoken dialogue management and motivate the need for evaluation studies by discussing novel challenges and requirements for interactive systems. Issues concerning conversational dialogue modelling, such as knowledge representation, context, adaptation, learning, error handling, multimodality, ubiquitous computing, as well as practical requirements for commercial dialogue systems, such as robustness, scalability and portability, will be discussed and exemplified from the point of view of performance evaluation, usability, and user evaluation.
The second part of the tutorial will focus on methodologies and practices of evaluation, and will deal with basic concepts, methods and metrics for system performance evaluation and usability. In particular, challenges for the evaluation of advanced dialogue systems will be discussed. His main research interest is spoken dialogue technology.