Intelligent assistants (IAs) such as Siri and Cortana conversationally interact with users and execute a wide range of actions (e.g., searching the Web, setting alarms, and chatting). IAs can support these actions through the combination of various components such as automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, and language generation. However, the complexity of these components hinders developers from determining which component causes an error. To remove this hindrance, we focus on reformulation, which is a useful signal of user dissatisfaction, and propose a method to predict the reformulation causes. We evaluate the method using the user logs of a commercial IA. The experimental results have demonstrated that features designed to detect the error of a specific component improve the performance of reformulation cause detection.

Commonsense knowledge is essential for fully understanding language in many situations. We acquire large-scale commonsense knowledge from humans using a game with a purpose (GWAP) developed on a smartphone spoken dialogue system. We transform the manual knowledge acquisition process into an enjoyable quiz game and have collected over 150,000 unique commonsense facts by gathering the data of more than 70,000 players over eight months. In this paper, we present a simple method for maintaining the quality of acquired knowledge and an empirical analysis of the knowledge acquisition process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to collect large-scale knowledge via a GWAP on a widely-used spoken dialogue system.