Ambiguity representation and resolution in spoken dialogue systems
Egbert Ammicht, Alexandros Potamianos, Eric Fosler‐Lussier · 2001
Spoken natural language often contains ambiguities that must be addressed by a spoken dialogue system. In this work, we present the internal semantic representation and resolution strategy of a dialogue system designed to understand ambiguous input. These mechanisms are domain independent; almost all task-specific knowledge is represented in parameterizable data structures. The system derives candidate descriptions of what the user said from raw input data, context-tracking and scoring. These candidates are chosen on the basis of a pragmatic analysis of responses elicited by an extensive implicit and explicit confirmation dialogue strategy, combined with specific error correction capabilities available to the user. This new ambiguity resolution strategy greatly improves dialogue interaction, eliminating about half of the errors in dialogues from a travel reservation task.