Older adults are a challenging user group
because their behaviour can be highly variable.
To the best of our knowledge, this
is the first study where dialogue strategies
are learned and evaluated with both simulated
younger users and simulated older
users. The simulated users were derived
from a corpus of interactions with a strict
system-initiative spoken dialogue system
(SDS). Learning from simulated younger
users leads to a policy which is close to
one of the dialogue strategies of the underlying
SDS, while the simulated older users
allow us to learn more flexible dialogue
strategies that accommodate mixed initiative.
We conclude that simulated users are
a useful technique for modelling the behaviour
of new user groups