A spoken dialogue system for enabling information behavior of various intention levels

Abstract

This paper describes a spoken dialogue system for accommodating a user’s information behaviors with various levels of information need. Our system, given a set of same-topic news articles, compiles a utterance plan that consists of a primary plan for delivering main news content, and the associated subsidiary plans for supplementing the main content. A primary plan is generated by applying text summarization and style conversion techniques. The subsidiary plans are compiled by considering potential user/system interactions. To make this mechanism work, we first classified user’s possible passive/active behaviors, and then designed the corresponding system actions. We empirically confirmed that our system was able to deliver the news content smoothly while dynamically adapting to the change of user’s intention levels. The smoothness of a conversation can be attributed to the pre-compiled utterance plan.