Data-driven user simulation for automated evaluation of spoken dialog systems

This paper proposes a novel integrated dialog simulation technique for evaluating spoken dialog systems. A data-driven user simulation technique for simulating user intention and utterance is introduced. A novel user intention modeling and generating method is proposed that uses a linear-chain conditional random field, and a two-phase data-driven domain-specific user utterance Simulation method and a linguistic knowledge-based ASR channel simulation method are also presented. Evaluation metrics are introduced to measure the quality of user simulation at intention and utterance. Experiments using these techniques were carried out to evaluate the performance and behavior of dialog systems designed for car navigation dialogs and a building guide robot, and it turned out that Our approach was easy to set tip and showed similar tendencies to real human users. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.