Mixed-initiative intent recognition using cloud-based cognitive services

Abstract

In spoken dialogue systems, understanding the intention of a user is essential for a succesful and natural perceived human-machine interaction. Therefore, in the scope of this thesis, the creation and evaluation of a dialogue system is presented, which relies on the cloud-based Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) from Microsoft in order to recognize automatically the intention of a user from an utterance. For the evaluation of the cloud-based approach, the LUIS-based system is tested against a conservative hand-crafted grammar-based system by conducting an online study, with regard to the degree of the complexity of the user input. The main focus of the evaluation is put on system performance and user experience. For comparison of the different approaches, a mixed-initiative dialogue is designed for each system. Fassung June 8, 2017