Machine Learning Methods for Spoken Dialogue Simulation and Optimization

Computers and electronic devices are becoming more and more present in our day-to-day life. This can of course be partly explained by their ability to ease the achievement of complex and boring tasks, the important decrease of prices or the new entertainment styles they offer. Yet, this real incursion in everybody's life would not have been possible without an important improvement of Human-Computer Interfaces (HCI). This is why HCI are now widely studied and become a major trend of research among the scientific community. Designing “user-friendly” interfaces usually requires multidisciplinary skills in fields such as computer science, ergonomics, psychology, signal processing etc. In this chapter, we argue that machine learning methods can help in designing efficient speech-based humancomputer interfaces

Optimising Spoken Dialogue Strategies within the Reinforcement Learning Paradigm

Optimising Spoken Dialogue Strategies within the Reinforcement Learning Paradig

Reinforcement Learning

Brains rule the world, and brain-like computation is increasingly used in computers and electronic devices. Brain-like computation is about processing and interpreting data or directly putting forward and performing actions. Learning is a very important aspect. This book is on reinforcement learning which involves performing actions to achieve a goal. The first 11 chapters of this book describe and extend the scope of reinforcement learning. The remaining 11 chapters show that there is already wide usage in numerous fields. Reinforcement learning can tackle control tasks that are too complex for traditional, hand-designed, non-learning controllers. As learning computers can deal with technical complexities, the tasks of human operators remain to specify goals on increasingly higher levels. This book shows that reinforcement learning is a very dynamic area in terms of theory and applications and it shall stimulate and encourage new research in this field

Machine Learning

Machine Learning can be defined in various ways related to a scientific domain concerned with the design and development of theoretical and implementation tools that allow building systems with some Human Like intelligent behavior. Machine learning addresses more specifically the ability to improve automatically through experience

AIDED DESIGN OF FINITE-STATE DIALOGUE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Due to recent progresses in the field of speech and natural language processing, spoken dialogue systems are becoming more and more common. Nevertheless, the design of complete dialogue systems remains uneasy. On the one hand, developing such a system involves defining a dialogue strategy. Though automatic learning of dialogue strategies has been introduced in several researches, it stays hard to use in practice. On the other hand, system design implies some coding skills and is still a job for specialists despite the emergence of the VoiceXML language. In this paper we describe a graphical interface dedicated to ease the development of dialogue systems. The user of the interface may be helped along his design thanks to automatically learned strategies. 1