The transition from system-directed to mixed-initiative human-machine dialogue has been a focus of several research institutes and industries during the past several years [4,5]. The term “mixedinitiative” was introduced in the artificial intelligence literature by Jaime Carbonell, who described a prototype that “is capable of maintaining a mixed initiative dialogue with the student, with quest...

A spoken dialog system performs best when users speak within the grammar that the system understands. We conducted a simple study to investigate how easily users can be persuaded to speak to a system using a restricted, less-thannatural-language input style. In a Wizard-of-Oz setting, users of a spoken dialogue system for information access were given brief instructions to “speak simply” to the...

This paper introduces a new corpus of consulting dialogues designed for training a dialogue manager that can handle consulting dialogues through spontaneous interactions from the tagged dialogue corpus. We have collected more than 150 hours of consulting dialogues in the tourist guidance domain. This paper outlines our taxonomy of dialogue act (DA) annotation that can describe two aspects of an...

Within human-machine conversation, clarification is vital and may consist of various forms, as it is may by due to many different effects on different levels of communication. In this paper, we present a strategy for detecting situations where a need for clarification exists in a natural spoken dialogue system. We define rule sets which enable us, via an anomaly analysis, to detect these critic...

Examples from chat interaction are presented to demonstrate that machine translation of written interaction shares many problems with translation of spoken interaction. The potential for common solutions to the problems is illustrated by describing operations that normalize and tag input before translation. Segmenting utterances into small translation units and processing short turns separately...

This paper presents the characteristic differences of linguistic and acoustic features observed in different spoken dialogue situations and with different dialogue partners: human-human vs. humanmachine interactions. And it also presents influences of awareness of users on those characteristics. We compare the linguistic and acoustic features of the user’s speech to a spoken dialogue system and...

Unlike traditional over-the-phone spoken dialog systems (SDSs), modern dialog systems tend to have visual rendering on the device screen as an additional modality to communicate the system’s response to the user. Visual display of the system’s response not only changes human behavior when interacting with devices, but also creates new research areas in SDSs. Onscreen item identification and res...

We describe a computational framework for modeling and managing turn-taking in openworld spoken dialog systems. We present a representation and methodology for tracking the conversational dynamics in multiparty interactions, making floor control decisions, and rendering these decisions into appropriate behaviors. We show how the approach enables an embodied conversational agent to participate i...

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 ques...

Identifying the level of expertise of its users is important for a system since it can lead to a better interaction through adaptation techniques. Furthermore, this information can be used in offline processes of root cause analysis. However, not much effort has been put into automatically identifying the level of expertise of an user, especially in dialog-based interactions. In this paper we p...