Design Guidelines for Developing Systems for Dialogue System Competitions

Abstract

Dialogue system development involves a variety of factors and requires multifaceted consideration, so design guidelines would be helpful. Although a neural-based approach can be used, it requires a vast amount of dialogue data and would take too much effort to collect them to develop a system for a specific and fixed-length dialogue. Furthermore, errors in automatic speech recognition and language understanding should be explicitly considered in the design because they are inevitable when the system talks with general users and would lower their impressions. We propose design guidelines for developing dialogue systems. Our systems developed with the aid of these guidelines took first place in two dialogue system competitions: the situation track of the second Dialogue System Live Competition and a pre-preliminary test of the Dialogue Robot Competition. Our proposed design guidelines are to (1) make the system take initiative, (2) avoid dialogue flows from relying too much on user utterances, and (3) include in system utterances that the system understands what the user said. We also show more details regarding the systems designed for each of the two competitions with examples, such as the dialogue examples in the two competitions and the scores of questionnaire by real users.