Abstract

Conversational interfaces hold the promise of providing natural, easy, and universal access to information. This project targets two specific problems in conversational engineering under a unifying stochastic modeling framework:(1) dialog interaction modeling (2) user modeling in spoken dialog. These problems are related: user models are essential in designing optimal dialog strategies, while discourse state information is essential for user behavior modeling. Conversational participants--humans or machines--are modeled as stochastic dynamical systems, interacting with one another over a noisy communication channel. Noise in the channel may be due to errors in machine speech recognition, language understanding, or other machine/user communication errors. Algorithms based on mathematical game theory and robust design are formulated for derivation of optimal mixed-initiative dialog control strategies …

Date

2003

Authors

Shrikanth S Narayanan

Journal

NSF Award Number 0238514. Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering

Volume

2

Issue

238514

Pages

38514