Introducing adaptability to natural-language systems through user modeling

Abstract

A primary way of improving spoken dialogue technology towards incorporating more natural human-computer interaction is by making the systems user-adaptive, which indicates the ability of dialogue systems to conduct user-tailored interaction. Such an adaptation of the system to an individual user can be achieved by building a system’s model of the user and exploiting this model to provide responses customized for the individual user. In this case, the system will adapt its part of the dialogue interaction according to the user’s goals, plans and beliefs inferred by its user model enabling communication with the user in a manner more convenient for addressing his/ her requirements. Also, the system is required to change its user model dynamically, in order to reflect the specific characteristics of the particular user. The prototype system has been built as an attempt at exploring how dialogue systems can be made user adaptive through the above concept of building and exploiting dynamic models of users. The system specifically demonstrates how this technology can be harnessed to cater for large-scale business domains such as insurance and banking industries where the call centers can make use of such a system to attend the typically overwhelming amounts of customer queries, saving hugely the employee time and effort.