Effects of variable initiative on linguistic behavior in human-computer spoken natural language dialogue

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the dialogue structure of actual human-computer interactions. The 141 dialogues analyzed were produced from experiments with a variable initiative spoken natural language dialogue system organized around the paradigm of the Missing Axiom Theory for language use. Results about utterance classification into subdialogues, frequency of userinitiated subdialogue transitions, regularity of subdialogue transitions, frequency of linguistic control shifts, and frequency of user-initiated error corrections are presented. These results indicate there are differences in user behavior and dialogue structure as a function of the computer's level of initiative. Furthermore, they provide evidence that a spoken natural language dialogue system must be capable of varying its level of initiative in order to facilitate effective interaction with users of varying levels of expertise and experience