Automated two-way entrainment to improve spoken dialog system performance

This paper proposes an approach to the use of lexical entrainment in Spoken Dialog Systems. This approach aims to increase the dialog success rate by adapting the lexical choices of the system to the user´s lexical choices. If the system finds that the users lexical choice degrades the performance, it will try to establish a new conceptual pact, proposing other words that the user may adopt, in order to be more successful in task completion. The approach was implemented and tested in two different systems. Tests showed a relative dialog estimated error rate reduction of 10% and a relative reduction in the average number of turns per session of 6%.