Scoring Criteria for Tree Based Dialogue Course Management

In this paper, we propose different scoring criteria 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 presumably meets the user's request. The criteria and used data structures are independently from the underlying domain and can therefore be used for different applications of spoken dialogue systems. Experiments were performed on a German inhouse corpus that covers the domain of a German telephone directory assistance.