Learning to generate naturalistic utterances using reviews in spoken dialogue systems

Abstract

Spoken language generation for dialogue systems requires a dictionary of mappings between semantic representations of concepts the system wants to express and realizations of those concepts. Dictionary creation is a costly process; it is currently done by hand for each dialogue domain. We propose a novel unsupervised method for learning such mappings from user reviews in the target domain, and test it on restaurant reviews. We test the hypothesis that user reviews that provide individual ratings for distinguished attributes of the domain entity make it possible to map review sentences to their semantic representation with high precision. Experimental analyses show that the mappings learned cover most of the domain ontology, and provide good linguistic variation. A subjective user evaluation shows that the consistency between the semantic representations and the learned realizations is high and that the naturalness of the realizations is higher than a hand-crafted baseline. © 2006 Association for Computational Linguistics.