We compare two models for corpus-based selection of dialogue responses: one based on cross-language relevance with a cross-language LSTM model. Each model is tested on multiple corpora, collected from two different types of dialogue source material. Results show that while the LSTM model performs adequately on a very large corpus (millions of utterances), its performance is dominated by the cross-language relevance model for a more moderate-sized corpus (ten thousands of utterances).

We evaluate several publicly available off-the-shelf (commercial and research) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems across diverse dialogue domains (in US-English). Our evaluation is aimed at non-experts with limited experience in speech recognition. Our goal is not only to compare a variety of ASR systems on several diverse data sets but also to measure how much ASR technology has advanced since our previous large-scale evaluations on the same data sets. Our results show that the performance of each speech recognizer can vary significantly depending on the domain. Furthermore, despite major recent progress in ASR technology, current state-of-the-art speech recognizers perform poorly in domains that require special vocabulary and language models, and under noisy conditions. We expect that our evaluation will prove useful to ASR consumers and dialogue system designers.