Work

Probabilistic Dialogue Models with Prior Domain Knowledge

Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: Probabilistic models such as Bayesian Networks are now in widespread use in spoken dialogue systems, but their scalability to complex interaction domains remains a challenge. One central limitation is that the state space of such models grows exponentially with the problem size, which makes parameter estimation increasingly difficult, especially for domains where only limited training data is available. In this paper, we show how to capture the underlying structure of a dialogue domain in terms of probabilistic rules operating on the dialogue state. The probabilistic rules are associated with a small, compact set of parameters that can be directly estimated from data. We argue that the introduction of this abstraction mechanism yields probabilistic models that are easier to learn and generalise better than their unstructured counterparts. We empirically demonstrate the benefits of such an approach learning a dialogue policy for a human-robot interaction domain based on a Wizard-of-Oz data set.\n\nProceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), pages 179–188, Seoul, South Korea, 5-6 July 2012.
Author: Pierre Lison
Institution: University of Oslo
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1951650891
FWCI: 3.482
Cites: 37
Cited by: 14
Related to: 10