Bootstrapping Development of a Cloud-Based Spoken Dialog System in the Educational Domain from Scratch Using Crowdsourced Data. Research Report. ETS RR-16-16

We propose a crowdsourcing-based framework to iteratively and rapidly bootstrap a dialog system from scratch for a new domain. We leverage the open-source modular HALEF dialog system to deploy dialog applications. We illustrate the usefulness of this framework using four different prototype dialog items with applications in the educational domain and present initial results and insights from this endeavor.