Computer-aided analysis and design for spoken dialogue systems based on quantitative simulations

In this paper, a complete development of computer-aided analysis and design approaches for spoken dialogue systems based on quantitative simulations is presented. With this approach the various performance metrics of a dialogue system can be flexibly defined and numerically evaluated, such that the behavior and performance of the dialogue system can be well predicted and efficiently analyzed before the implementation of the real spoken dialogue system is completed. How the different dialogue performance measures vary with respect to each of the many very complicated factors, regardless of whether it is caused by an individual component, by the overall system design, or by users' response patterns, can be separately identified, because all such factors can he precisely controlled in the simulation. Several analysis examples are presented to show how the approach can be used, including selection and tuning of the speech understanding front end, system strategy design considering query factors and confirmation factors, and objective estimates of user's degree of satisfaction. This approach is therefore very useful for the analysis and design of spoken dialogue systems, although the online test, corpus-based analysis and user survey can always follow after the system is online.