SIGdial 2013

14th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Surface Text based Dialogue Models for Virtual Humans

Sudeep Gandhe, David Traum

We present virtual human dialogue models which primarily operate on the surface text level and can be extended to incorporate additional information state annotations such as topics or results from simpler models. We compare these models with previously proposed models as well as two human-level upper baselines. The models are evaluated by collecting appropriateness judgments from human judges for responses generated for a set of fixed dialogue contexts. Our results show that the best performing models achieve close to human-level performance and require only surface text dialogue transcripts to train.