Spoken dialogue for information navigation

Abstract

Aiming to expand the current research paradigm for training conversational AI agents that can address real-world challenges, we take a step away from traditional slot-filling goal-oriented spoken dialogue systems (SDS) and model the dialogue in a way that allows users to be more expressive in describing their needs. The goal is to help users make informed decisions rather than being fed matching items. To this end, we describe the Linked-Data SDS (LD-SDS), a system that exploits semantic knowledge bases that connect to linked data, and supports complex constraints and preferences. We describe the required changes in language understanding and state tracking, and the need for mined features, and we report the promising results (in terms of semantic errors, effort, etc) of a preliminary evaluation after training two statistical dialogue managers in various conditions.