A Comparison between Dialog Corpora Acquired with Real and Simulated Users

David Griol, Zoraida Callejas and Ramón López-Cózar

SIGDIAL Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2009)
Queen Mary University of London, September 11-12, 2009

Summary

In this paper, we test the applicability of a stochastic user simulation technique to generate dialogs which are similar to real human-machine spoken interactions. To do so, we present the comparison between two corpora employing a comprehensive set of evaluation measures. The first corpus was acquired from real interactions of users with a spoken dialog system, whereas the second was acquired by means of the simulation technique, which decides the next user answer taking into account the previous user turns, the last system answer and the objective of the dialog.