A method for the approximation of incremental understanding of explicit utterance meaning using predictive models in finite domains

David DeVault and David Traum

This paper explores the relationship between explicit and predictive models of incremental speech understanding in a dialogue system that supports a finite set of user utterance meanings. We present a method that enables the approximation of explicit understanding using information implicit in a predictive understanding model for the same domain. We show promising performance for this method in a corpus evaluation, and discuss its practical application and annotation costs in relation to some alternative approaches.