Causal analysis of task completion errors in spoken music retrieval interactions

In this paper, we analyze the causes of task completion errors in spoken dialog systems, using a decision tree with N-gram features of the dialog to detect task-incomplete dialogs. The dialog for a music retrieval task is described by a sequence of tags related to user and system utterances and behaviors. The dialogs are manually classified into two classes: completed and uncompleted music retrieval tasks. Differences in tag classification performance between the two classes are discussed. We then construct decision trees which can detect if a dialog finished with the task completed or not, using information gain criterion. Decision trees using N-grams of manual tags and automatic tags achieved 74.2% and 80.4% classification accuracy, respectively, while the tree using interaction parameters achieved an accuracy rate of 65.7%. We also discuss more details of the causality of task incompletion for spoken dialog systems using such trees.