An Overview of End-to-End Language Understanding and Dialog Management for Personal Digital Assistants

Spoken language understanding and dialog management have emerged as key technologies in interacting with personal digital assistants (PDAs). The coverage, complexity, and the scale of PDAs are much larger than previous conversational understanding systems. As such, new problems arise. In this paper, we provide an overview of the language understanding and dialog management capabilities of PDAs, focusing particularly on Cortana, Microsoft’s PDA. We explain the system architecture for language understanding and dialog management for our PDA, indicate how it differs with prior state-of-the-art systems, and describe key components. We also report a set of experiments detailing system performance on a variety of scenarios and tasks. We describe how the quality of user experiences are measured end-to-end and also discuss open issues.