Root Cause Analysis of Miscommunication Hotspots in Spoken Dialogue Systems

A major challenge in Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) is the detection of problematic communication (hotspots), as well as the classification of these hotspots into different types (root cause analysis). In this work, we focus on two classes of root cause, namely, erroneous speech recognition vs. other (e.g., dialogue strategy). Specifically, we propose an automatic algorithm for detecting hotspots and classifying root causes in two subsequent steps. Regarding hotspot detection, various lexico-semantic features are used for capturing repetition patterns along with affective features. Lexico-semantic and repetition features are also employed for root cause analysis. Both algorithms are evaluated with respect to the Let’s Go dataset (bus information system). In terms of classification unweighted average recall, performance of 80% and 70% is achieved for hotspot detection and root cause analysis, respectively.