Why it is interesting to investigate how people talk to computers and robots: Introduction to the special issue (original) (raw)

How People Talk to Computers, Robots, and Other Artificial Communication Partners

2006

End-to-end evaluations of more conversational dialogue systems with naive users have uncovered severe usability problems that, among other things, result in low task completion rates. First analyses suggest that these problems are related to the system’s dialogue management and turn-taking behavior. This paper starts with a presentation of experimental results, which shed some light on the effects of that behavior. Based on these findings, some criteria which lie orthogonal to dialogue quality are spelled out. As such, they nevertheless constitute an integral part of a more comprehensive view on dialogue felicity as a function of dialogue quality and efficiency. Since the work on spoken and multimodal dialogue systems presented and discussed herein is aimed at more conversational and adaptive systems, we also show that in certain dialogical situations it is important for such systems to align linguistically towards the users. After describing the corresponding empirical experiments ...

Perception of Artificial Agents and Utterance Friendliness in Dialogue

The present contribution investigates the construction of dialogue structure for the use in human-machine interaction especially for robotic systems and embodied conversational agents. We are going to present a methodology and findings of a pilot study for the design of task-specific dialogues. Specifically, we investigated effects of dialogue complexity on two levels: First, we examined the perception of the embodied conversational agent, and second, we studied participants' performance following HRI. To do so, we manipulated the agent's friendliness during a brief conversation with the user in a receptionist scenario. The paper presents an overview of the dialogue system, the process of dialogue construction, and initial evidence from an evaluation study with na¨ve users (N = 40). These users interacted with the system in a task-based dialogue in which they had to ask for the way in a building unknown to them. Afterwards participants filled in a questionnaire. Our findings...

Pragmatics in human-computer conversations

This paper provides a pragmatic analysis of some human-computer conversations carried out during the past six years within the context of the Loebner Prize Contest, an annual competition in which computers participate in Turing Tests. The Turing Test posits that to be granted intelligence, a computer should imitate human conversational behavior so well as to be indistinguishable from a real human being. We carried out an empirical study exploring the relationship between computers' violations of Grice's cooperative principle and conversational maxims, and their success in imitating human language use. Based on conversation analysis and a large survey, we found that different maxims have different effects when violated , but more often than not, when computers violate the maxims, they reveal their identity. The results indicate that Grice's cooperative principle is at work during conversations with computers. On the other hand, studying human-computer communication may require some modifications of existing frameworks in pragmatics because of certain characteristics of these conversational environments. Pragmatics constitutes a serious challenge to computational linguistics. While existing programs have other significant shortcomings, it may be that the biggest hurdle in developing computer programs which can successfully carry out conversations will be modeling the ability to 'cooperate'. 0

Consequences and Factors of Stylistic Differences in Human-Robot Dialogue

Proceedings of the 19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

This paper identifies stylistic differences in instruction-giving observed in a corpus of human-robot dialogue. Differences in verbosity and structure (i.e., single-intent vs. multi-intent instructions) arose naturally without restrictions or prior guidance on how users should speak with the robot. Different styles were found to produce different rates of miscommunication, and correlations were found between style differences and individual user variation, trust, and interaction experience with the robot. Understanding potential consequences and factors that influence style can inform design of dialogue systems that are robust to natural variation from human users.

How Do People Talk with a Robot? An Analysis of Human-Robot Dialogues in the Real World

This paper reports the preliminary results of a human- robot dialogue analysis in the real world with the goal of understanding users’ interaction patterns. We analyzed the dialogue log data of Roboceptionist, a robotic receptionist located in a high-traffic area in an academic building [2][3]. The results show that (i) the occupation and background (persona) of the robot help people establish common ground with the robot, and (ii) there is great variability in the extent that users follow social norms of human-human dialogues in human-robot dialogues. Based on these results, we describe implications for designing the dialogue of a social robot.

What makes speakers angry in human-computer conversation

2000

Often, it cannot be completely avoided that current human-computer conversation systems function in a way that is dissatisfactory for the user. In this paper it is investigated what exactly it is that makes speakers angry and how their linguistic behaviour may change globally, in accordance with their changing speaker attitude, and locally, in reaction to particular system malfunctions. The prosodic peculiarities of the speakers' utterances can serve as indicators for the amount of problems a particular type of system malfunction may create. They can also serve to show which types of interventions by system designers can be useful. 1 1 Problem Human-computer conversation systems do not always work as they should. The problem which arises is that if speakers are repeatedly confronted with system malfunctions, the properties of

Ill-formedness and miscommunication in person-machine dialogue

Information and Software Technology, 1987

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Expressive Speech Characteristics in the Communication with Artificial Agents

This paper deals with emotional speech characteristics in human-computer- and human-robot interaction. The focus is on the users' involuntary expression of emotion in reaction to system malfunction, which may cause severe problems for automatic speech recognition and processing. Investigating different user groups is shown to be a useful method for determining what makes speakers respond emotionally and for understanding the interpersonal differences that can be observed in reaction to system malfunction. Which aspects may be in- volved is illustrated by discussing the example of the personal relationship between user and system as evident from the different forms of address that can be found in the corpora. We shall draw on corpora of human- computer and human-robot communication involving children and adults from both sexes. However, it will be demonstrated that the major factor that determines the users' expressive behaviour is their conceptualisation of the artificial ...