Deployed Spoken Dialog Systems’ Alpha and Omega: Adaptation and Optimization

Abstract

Regular tuning of spoken dialog systems is crucial to achieve maximum performance soon after the original deployment and to keep and improve the performance level during the lifetime of these systems. Often, speech recognition and understanding as well as dialog management are embedded in a continuous optimization and adaptation cycle whose details are explained in the present chapter. In addition, several techniques for quality assurance of transcription and semantic annotation as well as the statistical dialog management optimization techniques Escalator, Engager, and Contender are discussed.