A Multi-lingual Evaluation of the vAssist Spoken Dialog System. Comparing Disco and RavenClaw

vAssist (Voice Controlled Assistive Care and Communication Services for the Home) is a European project for which several research institutes and companies have been working on the development of adapted spoken interfaces to support home care and communication services. This paper describes the spoken dialog system that has been built. Its natural language understanding module includes a novel reference resolver and it introduces a new hierarchical paradigm to model dialog tasks. The user-centered approach applied to the whole development process led to the setup of several experiment sessions with real users. Multilingual experiments carried out in Austria, France and Spain are described along with their analyses and results in terms of both system performance and user experience. An additional experimental comparison of the RavenClaw and Disco-LFF dialog managers built into the vAssist spoken dialog system highlighted similar performance and user acceptance.