Responses generated by neural conversational models (NCMs) for non-task-oriented systems are difficult to evaluate. We propose contrastive response pairs (CRPs) for automatically evaluating responses from non-task-oriented NCMs. We conducted an error analysis on responses generated by an encoder-decoder recurrent neural network (RNN) type NCM and created three types of CRPs corresponding to the three most frequent errors found in the analysis. Three NCMs of different response quality were objectively evaluated with the CRPs and compared to a subjective assessment. The correctness obtained by the three types of CRPs were consistent with the results of the subjective assessment.

Recursive autoencoders (RAEs) for compositionality of a vector space model were applied to utterance intent classification of a smartphone-based Japanese-language spoken dialogue system. Though the RAEs express a nonlinear operation on the vectors of child nodes, the operation is considered to be different intrinsically depending on types of child nodes. To relax the difference, a data-driven untying of autoencoders (AEs) is proposed. The experimental result of the utterance intent classification showed an improved accuracy with the proposed method compared with the basic tied RAE and untied RAE based on a manual rule.

Dialogue robots are attractive to people, and in language learning systems, they motivate learners and let them practice conversational skills in more realistic environment. However, automatic speech recognition (ASR) of the second language (L2) learners is still a challenge, because their speech contains not just pronouncing, lexical, grammatical errors, but is sometimes totally disordered. Hence, we propose a novel robot assisted language learning (RALL) system using two robots, one as a teacher and the other as an advanced learner. The system is designed to simulate multiparty conversation, expecting implicit learning and enhancement of predictability of learners’ utterance through an alignment similar to “interactive alignment”, which is observed in human-human conversation. We collected a database with the prototypes, and measured how much the alignment phenomenon observed in the database with initial analysis.