Applications in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in the notso-distant future include robots that collaborate with factory workers or serve us as caregivers or waitstaff. When offering customized functionality in these dynamic environments, robots need to engage in real-time exchanges with humans. Robots thus need to be capable of participating in smooth turn-taking interactions. The research goal ...

Even as progress in speech technologies and task and dialog modeling has allowed the development of advanced spoken dialog systems, the low-level interaction behavior of those systems remains often rigid and inefficient. The goal of this thesis, is to provide a framework and models to endow spoken dialog systems with robust and flexible turn-taking abilities. To this end, we designed a new dial...

Most of the research on spoken dialogue systems so far has focused either on higher levels of dialogue or on speech understanding. In contrast, the lowlevel interactional aspects of conversation such as turn-taking have been essentially ignored, leading builders of practical systems to resort to simple pause detection-based methods to handle turn-taking. In a preliminary study based on the Let’...

As interactive voice response systems become more prevalent and provide increasingly more complex functionality, it becomes clear that the challenges facing such systems are not solely in their synthesis and recognition capabilities. Issues such as the coordination of turn exchanges between system and user also play an important role in system usability. In particular, both systems and users ha...

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...

In conversation, speakers become more like each other in various dimensions. This phenomenon, commonly called entrainment, coordination, or alignment, is widely believed to be crucial to the success and naturalness of human interactions. We investigate entrainment in four acoustic and prosodic dimensions. We explore whether speakers coordinate with each other in these dimensions over the conver...

The current study investigates the essential strategies of turn taking conversations from an analytical point view. data were collected everyday conversations, namely face to some students Duhok University identify basic structures talk in interactions Krmanji Kurdish. Stenstrom theory (1994) has been chosen for studying casual conversation analyses Badini Kurdish (4 participants) conversations...