Simulating the Behaviour of Older versus Younger Users when Interacting with Spoken Dialogue Systems

In this paper we build user simulations of older and younger adults using a corpus of interactions with a Wizard-of-Oz appointment scheduling system. We measure the quality of these models with standard metrics proposed in the literature. Our results agree with predictions based on statistical analysis of the corpus and previous findings about the diversity of older people's behaviour. Furthermore, our results show that these metrics can be a good predictor of the behaviour of different types of users, which provides evidence for the validity of current user simulation evaluation metrics.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Kallirroi Georgila, Maria Wolters, Johanna D. Moore
• Keywords: ACL 2008, Appointment Scheduling System, Computational Linguistics, Simulation Evaluation Metrics, User Simulation