Question: What is meant by semiguided dialogue, what part of dialogue is guided?
Evidence: The solution we propose in this paper tries to minimise these costs by increasing the pool of Wizards to anyone wanting to collaborate in the data collection, by providing them the necessary guidance to generate the desired dialogue behaviour. This is a valuable solution for collecting dialogues in domains where specific expertise is required and the cost of training capable Wizards is high. We required fine-grained control over the Wizard interface so as to be able to generate more directed dialogues for specialised domains, such as emergency response for offshore facilities. By providing the Wizard with several dialogue options (aside from free text), we guided the conversation and could introduce actions that change an internal system state. This proposes several advantages:
A guided dialogue allows for set procedures to be learned and reduces the amount of data needed for a machine learning model for dialogue management to converge.
Providing several dialogue options to the Wizard increases the pace of the interaction and allows them to understand and navigate more complex scenarios.
Dialogue structure: we introduced structured dialogues through a Finite State Machine (FSM) that controls the current dialogue state and offers multiple suitable and relevant state transitions (actions) to the Wizard depending on the point in the interaction, the state of the world and the history. A graph of dialogue states, transitions and utterances is loaded when the system is initialised, and each chat room has its own dialogue state, which changes through actions.
The dialogue structure for the Emergency Assistant (the Wizard) followed a dialogue flow previously used for the original lab-based Wizard-of-Oz study BIBREF4 but which was slightly modified and simplified for this crowdsourced data collection. In addition to the transitions that the FSM provides, there are other fixed dialogue options always available such as “Hold on, 2 seconds”, “Okay” or “Sorry, can you repeat that?” as a shortcut for commonly used dialogue acts, as well as the option to type a message freely.
The dialogue has several paths to reach the same states with varying levels of Operator control or engagement that enriched the heterogeneity of conversations. The Emergency Assistant dialogue options show various speaking styles, with a more assertive tone (“I am sending Husky 1 to east tower”) or others with more collaborative connotations (“Which robot do you want to send?” or “Husky 1 is available to send to east tower”). Refer to BIBREF4 for more details. Furthermore, neither participants were restricted in the number of messages that they could send and we did not require a balanced number of turns between them. However, there were several dialogue transitions that required an answer or authorisation from the Operator, so the FSM would lock the dialogue state until the condition was met. As mentioned earlier, the commands to control the robots are also transitions of the FSM, so they were not always available.
By providing the Wizard with several dialogue options (aside from free text), we guided the conversation and could introduce actions that change an internal system state. This proposes several advantages:

A guided dialogue allows for set procedures to be learned and reduces the amount of data needed for a machine learning model for dialogue management to converge.

Providing several dialogue options to the Wizard increases the pace of the interaction and allows them to understand and navigate more complex scenarios.
Dialogue structure: we introduced structured dialogues through a Finite State Machine (FSM) that controls the current dialogue state and offers multiple suitable and relevant state transitions (actions) to the Wizard depending on the point in the interaction, the state of the world and the history. A graph of dialogue states, transitions and utterances is loaded when the system is initialised, and each chat room has its own dialogue state, which changes through actions.
In addition to the transitions that the FSM provides, there are other fixed dialogue options always available such as “Hold on, 2 seconds”, “Okay” or “Sorry, can you repeat that?” as a shortcut for commonly used dialogue acts, as well as the option to type a message freely.
The dialogue has several paths to reach the same states with varying levels of Operator control or engagement that enriched the heterogeneity of conversations.
Answer: The answers are shown as follows:
* The Wizard can select one of several predefined messages to send, or type their own message if needed. Free text messages do not change the dialogue state in the FSM, so it is important to minimise their use by providing enough dialogue options to the Wizard.