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<Paper uid="E99-1051">
  <Title>Robust and Flexible Mixed-Initiative Dialogue for Telephone Services</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this contribution we present some improvements on the design of a Dialogue Management System for the automatization of simple telephone tasks in a PABX environment (automatic name dialing, voice messaging, ... ). From the point of view of its functionality, our system is a very simple one because there is no need of advanced Plan Recognition strategies or General Problem Solving methods. However we think that even for these kind of dialogue sytems there is still a long way to demonstrate their usability in real situations by the &amp;quot;general public&amp;quot;.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In our work we will concentrate on systems designed for the telephone line and for a wide range of potential users. Therefore our evaluations will be done taking into account different levels of speech recognition performance and user behaviours. In particular we will propose and evaluate strategies directed to increase the robustness against recognition errors and flexibility to deal with a wide range of users. We will use the PARADISE evaluation framework (Walker et al., 1998) to analyze both task success and agent dialogue behaviour related to subjective user satisfaction.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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