A stochastic approach to dialog management

In this article, we present an approach to the development of a stochastic dialog manager. The model used by this dialog manager to generate its turns takes into account both the last turns of the user and system, and the information supplied by the user throughout the dialog. As the space of situations that can be presented in the dialogs is too large, some techniques for reducing this space have been proposed. This system has been developed in the DIHANA project, whose goal is the design and development of a dialog system to access a railway information system using spontaneous speech in Spanish. A training corpus of 900 dialogs, that was acquired through the Wizard of Oz, was used to learn the models. An evaluation of the dialog manager is also presented