Collaborating on Utterances with a Spoken Dialogue System Using an ISU-based Approach to Incremental Dialogue Management

Abstract

When dialogue systems, through the use of incremental processing, are not bounded anymore by strict, nonoverlapping turn-taking, a whole range of additional interactional devices becomes available.We explore the use of one such device, trial intonation.We elaborate our approach to dialogue management in incremental systems, based on the Information-State-Update approach, and discuss an implementation in a microdomain that lends itself to the use of immediate feedback, trial intonations and expansions.In an overhearer evaluation, the incremental system was judged as significantly more human-like and reactive than a non-incremental version.