Integrating aggregation strategies in an in-home domain dialogue system

Abstract

This paper presents the integration of a natural language generation system onto an In-Home Domain Dialogue System to achieve fluent, non-redundant verbal descriptions of the state of the environment. Three important contributions are brought together in this integration: an in-depth study of aggregation strategies preferred by users in the In-Home Domain, a fully operational dialogue system, and a natural language generation system capable of implementing the required aggregation strategies. The integration is validated by means of acceptance tests with human evaluators. In this paper we show how the aggregation strategies remove redundancies and provide a description that is assigned higher scores by human evaluators than prior descriptions. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.