@inproceedings{rieser-lemon-2008-automatic,
    title = "Automatic Learning and Evaluation of User-Centered Objective Functions for Dialogue System Optimisation",
    author = "Rieser, Verena  and
      Lemon, Oliver",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Choukri, Khalid  and
      Maegaard, Bente  and
      Mariani, Joseph  and
      Odijk, Jan  and
      Piperidis, Stelios  and
      Tapias, Daniel",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC}`08)",
    month = may,
    year = "2008",
    address = "Marrakech, Morocco",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/L08-1171/",
    abstract = "The ultimate goal when building dialogue systems is to satisfy the needs of real users, but quality assurance for dialogue strategies is a non-trivial problem. The applied evaluation metrics and resulting design principles are often obscure, emerge by trial-and-error, and are highly context dependent. This paper introduces data-driven methods for obtaining reliable objective functions for system design. In particular, we test whether an objective function obtained from Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) data is a valid estimate of real users’ preferences. We test this in a test-retest comparison between the model obtained from the WOZ study and the models obtained when testing with real users. We can show that, despite a low fit to the initial data, the objective function obtained from WOZ data makes accurate predictions for automatic dialogue evaluation, and, when automatically optimising a policy using these predictions, the improvement over a strategy simply mimicking the data becomes clear from an error analysis."
}