Incremental Dialog Processing in a Task-Oriented Dialog

Incremental Dialog Processing (IDP) enables Spoken Dialog Systems to gradually process minimal units of user speech in order to give the user an early system response. In this paper, we present an application of IDP that shows its effectiveness in a task-oriented dialog system. We have implemented an IDP strategy and deployed it for one month on a real-user system. We compared the resulting dialogs with dialogs produced over the previous month without IDP. Results show that the incremental strategy significantly improved system performance by eliminating long and often off-task utterances that generally produce poor speech recognition results. User behavior is also affected; the user tends to shorten utterances after being interrupted by the system.