Giving voice to the Internet by means of conversational agents

Proceedings of: 15th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning (IDEAL 2014), Salmanca, Spain,In this paper we present a proposal to develop conversational agents that avoids the effort of manually defining the dialog strategy for the agent and also takes into account the benefits of using current standards. In our proposal the dialog manager is trained by means of a POMDP-based methodology using a labeled dialog corpus automatically acquired using a user modeling technique. The statistical dialog model automatically selects the next system response. Thus, system developers only need to define a set of files, each including a system prompt and the associated grammar to recognize user responses. We have applied this technique to develop a conversational agent in VoiceXML that provides information for planning a trip.This work has been supported in part by the Spanish Government under i-Support (Intelligent Agent Based Driver Decision Support) Project (TRA2011-29454-C03- 03), and Projects MINECO TEC2012-37832-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02- 02, and CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485