Natural Language Generation as Planning under Uncertainty for Spoken Dialogue Systems [chapter]

Verena Rieser, Oliver Lemon
2010 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
We present and evaluate a new model for Natural Language Generation (NLG) in Spoken Dialogue Systems, based on statistical planning, given noisy feedback from the current generation context (e.g. a user and a surface realiser). We study its use in a standard NLG problem: how to present information (in this case a set of search results) to users, given the complex tradeoffs between utterance length, amount of information conveyed, and cognitive load. We set these trade-offs by analysing existing
more » ... MATCH data. We then train a NLG policy using Reinforcement Learning (RL), which adapts its behaviour to noisy feedback from the current generation context. This policy is compared to several baselines derived from previous work in this area. The learned policy significantly outperforms all the prior approaches.
doi:10.1007/978-3-642-15573-4_6 fatcat:tb6fmuwasjd3tgkg3b3ccbgzmu