Setting Up User Action Probabilities in User Simulations for Dialog System Development

Abstract

User simulations are shown to be useful in spoken dialog system development. Since most current user simulations deploy probability models to mimic human user behaviors, how to set up user action probabilities in these models is a key problem to solve. One generally used approach is to estimate these probabilities from human user data. However, when building a new dialog system, usually no data or only a small amount of data is available. In this study, we compare estimating user probabilities from a small user data set versus handcrafting the probabilities. We discuss the pros and cons of both solutions for different dialog system development tasks.