Feature Functions for Tree-Based Dialogue Course Management

We propose a set of feature functions for dialogue course management and investigate their effect on the system's behaviour for choosing the subsequent dialogue action during a dialogue session. Especially, we investigate whether the system is able to detect and resolve ambiguities, and if it always chooses that state which leads as quickly as possible to a final state that is likely to meet the user's request. The criteria and data structures used are independent of the underlying domain and can therefore be employed for different applications of spoken dialogue systems. Experiments were performed on a German in-house corpus that covers the domain of a German telephone directory assistance.