A music question answering system enhanced with dialogue management

The main challenge of question answering is that the lack of task structure prohibits the use of simplified assumptions as in task-oriented dialogue systems. This problem was tackled by integrating a dialogue management environment into a question answering system. Firstly, Wizard of Oz studies were conducted to discover how users describe their music information needs in contextual situations as well as single standalone questions. Subsequently, the system was constructed and enhanced with the ability to use the dialogue context and the Web to answer more extended questions about artists, songs, albums, tours, et cetera. Finally, the system was successfully tested on 120 dialogues with 10 users. The evaluation was reported on three variants of this system, and the results were promising with good levels of both task completion and user preferences.