Positive and negative user feedback in a spoken dialogue corpus

This paper examines feedback strategies in a Swedish corpus of multimodal human–computer interaction. The aim of the study is to investigate how users provide positive and negative feedback to a dialogue system and to discuss the function of these utterances in the dialogues. User feedback in the AdApt corpus was labeled and analyzed, and its distribution in the dialogues is discussed. The question of whether it is possible to utilize user feedback in future systems is considered. More specifically, we discuss how error handling in human–computer dialogue might be improved through greater knowledge of user feedback strategies. In the present corpus, almost all subjects used positive or negative feedback at least once during their interaction with the system. Our results indicate that some types of feedback more often occur in certain positions in the dialogue. Another observation is that there appear to be great individual variations in feedback strategies, so that certain subjects give feedback at almost every turn while others rarely or never respond to a spoken dialogue system in this manner. Finally, we discuss how feedback could be used to prevent problems in human–computer dialogue.