Dialog State Tracking Challenge Handbook

Background, motivation, and challenge overview In dialog systems, "state tracking" – sometimes also called "belief tracking" – refers to accurately estimating the user’s goal as a dialog progresses. Accurate state tracking is desirable because it provides robustness to errors in speech recognition, and helps reduce ambiguity inherent in language within a temporal process like dialog. Dialog state tracking is an important problem for both traditional unimodal dialog systems, as well as speech-enabled multi-modal dialog systems on mobile devices, on tablet computers, and in automobiles.