Clarification in Spoken Dialogue Systems

Abstract

This paper argues for the use of more natural and flexible clarification questions in spoken dialogue systems. Several forms and aspects of clarification questions are discussed and exemplified by examples from human-human dialogue cor-pora. We show how clarification questions fit into the broader context of miscommunication and describe the types of in-formation spoken dialogue systems need in order to generate various different clarification forms. Two kinds of dialogue systems are considered: Slot-based dialogue systems and di-alogue systems with deep semantic analysis.