SIGdial 2014

15th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Word-Based Dialog State Tracking with Recurrent Neural Networks

Matthew Henderson, Blaise Thomson and Steve Young
Recently discriminative methods for tracking the state of a spoken dialog have been shown to outperform traditional generative models. This paper presents a new word-based tracking method which maps directly from the speech recognition results to the dialog state without using an explicit semantic decoder. The method is based on a recurrent neural network structure which is capable of generalising to unseen dialog state hypotheses, and which requires very little feature engineering. The method is evaluated on the second Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC2) corpus and the results demonstrate consistently high performance across all of the metrics.