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Abstract : |
This paper presents an analysis of the dialogue structure of actual human-computer interactions. The 141 dialogues analyzed were produced from experiments with a variable initiative spoken natural language dialogue system organized around the paradigm of the Missing Axiom Theory for language use. Results about utterance classification into subdialogues, frequency of user-initiated subdialogue transitions, regularity of subdialogue transitions, frequency of linguistic control shifts, and frequency of user-initiated error corrections are presen ted. These results indicate there are differences in user behavior and dialogue structure as a function of the computer's level of initiative. Furthermore, they provide evidence that a spoken natural language dialogue system must be capable of varying its level of initiative in order to facilitate effective interaction with users of varying levels of expertise and experience. 1. Modeling Human-Computer Dialogue It is generally acknowledged that developing a successful computational model of interactive natural language (NL) dialogue requires extensive analysis of sample dia-logues. Previous work has included analyses of (1) human-human dialogues in rele-vant task domains; (2) Wizard-of-Oz dialogues in which a human (the Wizard) simu-, |
