*****Jost is not able to visit us and give his talk due to Hurricane Wilma*****
Jost Schatzmann (http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~js532/) is visiting on Nov 21. He
is going to give a talk on "Learning Dialogue Management Strategies with a
Simulated User" at 10:30AM in SS5317. You can sign up to talk to him by making comments to this message.
(by Joel Tetreault, talk for Wed Nov 09)
II'll be giving a talk on the work I have been doing on using Markov Decision Processes (MDP's)'s to determine good policies for our ITSPOKE tutoring dialogues. The problem with dialogue systems, and especially tutoring ones, is that there are a lot of possible actions a tutor can take depending on the student state. For example, if a student appears frustrated and uncertain answering the last question the tutor poses, we may want to ask the student an easier question or give a hint the next turn. Or if the student has been doing really well lately and is breezing through our tutoring session, we may want to give him or her a harder question and possibly also ease back on the amount of feedback to give. Given the fact there are a wide range of features to describe the student state, making a hand-tuned policy for every possible student state is simply too laborious of a task to undertake. What we propose is to use MDP's to learn the best policies for a computer to take in a system. In this talk I will present preliminary results of our research.