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Modelling Goal Modifications in User Simulation

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Future and Emergent Trends in Language Technology (FETLT 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9577))

Abstract

User simulation is frequently used to evaluate spoken dialogue systems. Previous work in this field primarily focused on the users’ interaction behaviour. Less attention has been paid to the users’ goals, how they relate to the system capabilities, and how they may change over the course of a dialogue. User goals may be underspecified or overspecified in comparison to the attributes the system uses to describe objects in its domain. Goal modifications can occur, e.g., if no database entry matches the user query. Analysing empirical data, we show that the definition of possible goals and goal modifications impacts the results of a user test significantly in terms of system performance and discovered usability problems. We propose a task modelling approach able to represent such variable goals in user simulations. Dialogues simulated using this approach are shown to be more similar to empirical data than dialogues simulated with conventional task models.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Quality and Usability Lab, Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Stefan Hillmann & Klaus-Peter Engelbrecht

Authors
  1. Stefan Hillmann
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  2. Klaus-Peter Engelbrecht
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stefan Hillmann .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Seville, Seville, Spain

    José F. Quesada

  2. University of Seville, Seville, Spain

    Francisco-Jesús Martín Mateos

  3. University of Seville, Seville, Spain

    Teresa Lopez-Soto

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Hillmann, S., Engelbrecht, KP. (2016). Modelling Goal Modifications in User Simulation. In: Quesada, J., Martín Mateos, FJ., Lopez-Soto, T. (eds) Future and Emergent Trends in Language Technology. FETLT 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9577. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33500-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33500-1_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-33499-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-33500-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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