Spoken Dialogue Systems

The Dialog State Tracking Challenges 2 & 3 (DSTC2&3) were research challenge focused on improving the state of the art in tracking the state of spoken dialog systems. State tracking, sometimes called belief tracking, refers to accurately estimating the user's goal as a dialog progresses. Accurate state tracking is desirable because it provides robustness to errors in speech recognition, and helps reduce ambiguity inherent in language within a temporal process like dialog. In these challenges, participants were given labelled corpora of dialogs to develop state tracking algorithms. The trackers were then evaluated on a common set of held-out dialogs, which were released, un-labelled, during a one week period. The corpus was collected using Amazon Mechanical Turk, and consists of dialogs in two domains: restaurant information, and tourist information. Tourist information subsumes restaurant information, and includes bars, cafés etc. as well as multiple new slots. There were two rounds of evaluation using this data: DSTC 2 released a large number of training dialogs related to restaurant search. Compared to DSTC (which was in the bus timetables domain), DSTC 2 introduces changing user goals, tracking 'requested slots' as well as the new restaurants domain. Results from DSTC 2 were presented at SIGDIAL 2014. DSTC 3 addressed the problem of adaption to a new domain - tourist information. DSTC 3 releases a small amount of labelled data in the tourist information domain; participants will use this data plus the restaurant data from DSTC 2 for training. Dialogs used for training are fully labelled; user transcriptions, user dialog-act semantics and dialog state are all annotated. (This corpus therefore is also suitable for studies in Spoken Language Understanding.) Source: https://github.com/matthen/dstc Image Source: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W13-4065.pdf

Speech encompasses a wealth of information, including but not limited to content, paralinguistic, and environmental information. This comprehensive nature of speech significantly impacts communication and is crucial for human-computer interaction. Chat-Oriented Large Language Models (LLMs), known for their general-purpose assistance capabilities, have evolved to handle multi-modal inputs, including speech. Although these models can be adept at recognizing and analyzing speech, they often fall short of generating appropriate responses. We argue that this is due to the lack of principles on task definition and model development, which requires open-source datasets and metrics suitable for model evaluation. To bridge the gap, we present SD-Eval, a benchmark dataset aimed at multidimensional evaluation of spoken dialogue understanding and generation. SD-Eval focuses on paralinguistic and environmental information and includes 7,303 utterances, amounting to 8.76 hours of speech data. The data is aggregated from eight public datasets, representing four perspectives: emotion, accent, age, and background sound. To assess the SD-Eval benchmark dataset, we implement three different models and construct a training set following a process similar to that of SD-Eval. The training set contains 1,052.72 hours of speech data and 724.4k utterances. We also conduct a comprehensive evaluation using objective evaluation methods (e.g. BLEU and ROUGE), subjective evaluations and LLM-based metrics for the generated responses. Models conditioned with paralinguistic and environmental information outperform their counterparts in both objective and subjective measures. Moreover, experiments demonstrate that LLM-based metrics show a higher correlation with human evaluation compared to traditional metrics. We open-source SD-Eval at https://github.com/amphionspace/SD-Eval.

CQR is an extension to the Stanford Dialogue Corpus. It contains crowd-sourced rewrites to facilitate research in dialogue state tracking using natural language as the interface. Source: A dataset for resolving referring expressions in spoken dialogue via contextual query rewrites (CQR)