Towards adaptive dialogue systems for assistive living environments

Adaptive Dialogue Systems can be seen as smart interfaces that typically use natural language (spoken or written) as a means of communication. They are being used in many applications, such as customer service, in-car interfaces, even in rehabilitation, and therefore it is essential that these systems are robust, scalable and quickly adaptable in order to cope with changing user or system needs or environmental conditions. Making Dialogue Systems adaptive means overcoming several challenges, such as scalability or lack of training data. Achieving adaptation online has thus been an even greater challenge. We propose to build such a system, that will operate in an Assistive Living Environment and provide its services as a coach to patients that need to perform rehabilitative exercises. We are currently in the process of developing it, using Robot Operating System on a robotic platform.