Is it really worth it? Cost-based selection of system responses to speech-in-overlap

For purposes of discussion and feedback, we present a preliminary version of a simple yet powerful cost-based framework for spoken dialogue systems to continuously and incrementally decide whether to speak or not. The framework weighs the cost of producing speech in overlap against the cost of not speaking when something needs saying. Main features include a small number of parameters controlling characteristics that are readily understood, allowing manual tweaking as well as interpretation of trained parameter settings; observation-based estimates of expected overlap which can be adapted dynamically; and a simple and general method for context dependency. No evaluation has yet been undertaken, but the effects of the parameters; the observationbased cost of expected overlap trained on Switchboard data; and the context dependency using inter-speaker intensity differences from the same corpus are demonstrated with generated input data in the context of user barge-ins.