Predicting and Adapting to Poor Speech Recognition in a Spoken Dialogue System

Spoken dialogue system performance can vary widely for different users, as well as for the same user during different dialogues. This paper presents the design and evaluation of an adaptive spoken dialogue system. The system predicts whether a user is having speech recognition problems as a particular dialogue progresses, and automatically adapts its dialogue strategies based on its predictions. An empirical evaluation demonstrates the utility of the approach.