NASTIA: Negotiating Appointment Setting Interface

Layla El Asri, Rémi Lemonnier, Romain Laroche, Olivier Pietquin, Hatim Khouzaimi


Abstract
This paper describes a French Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) named NASTIA (Negotiating Appointment SeTting InterfAce). Appointment scheduling is a hybrid task halfway between slot-filling and negotiation. NASTIA implements three different negotiation strategies. These strategies were tested on 1734 dialogues with 385 users who interacted at most 5 times with the SDS and gave a rating on a scale of 1 to 10 for each dialogue. Previous appointment scheduling systems were evaluated with the same experimental protocol. NASTIA is different from these systems in that it can adapt its strategy during the dialogue. The highest system task completion rate with these systems was 81% whereas NASTIA had an 88% average and its best performing strategy even reached 92%. This strategy also significantly outperformed previous systems in terms of overall user rating with an average of 8.28 against 7.40. The experiment also enabled highlighting global recommendations for building spoken dialogue systems.
Anthology ID:
L14-1465
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
266–271
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/575_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Layla El Asri, Rémi Lemonnier, Romain Laroche, Olivier Pietquin, and Hatim Khouzaimi. 2014. NASTIA: Negotiating Appointment Setting Interface. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 266–271, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
NASTIA: Negotiating Appointment Setting Interface (El Asri et al., LREC 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/575_Paper.pdf