On the Means for Clarification in Dialogue (original) (raw)

The Theory and Use of Clarification Requests in Dialogue

2004

Clarification requests are an important, relatively common and yet under-studied dialogue device allowing a user to ask about some feature (e.g. the meaning or form) of an utterance, or part thereof. They can take many different forms (often highly elliptical) and can have many different meanings (requesting various types of information). This thesis combines empirical, theoretical and implementational work to provide a study of the various types of clarification request that exist, give a theoretical analysis thereof, and show how the results can be applied to add useful capabilities to a prototype computational dialogue system.

CLARIE: Handling Clarification Requests in a Dialogue System

Research on Language and Computation, 2006

This paper sets out a approach to clarification requests (CRs) general enough to cover all the major forms found in corpus data and specific enough to analyse the questions they ask about individual words and phrases. Its main features are a view of utterances as contextual abstracts with a radically abstracted semantic representation, and a view of CRs as standard utterances asking standard questions, but showing a particular kind of contextual dependence. It shows how it can be implemented computationally within a prototype text-based dialogue system, CLARIE, allowing it not only to generate CRs to clarify unknown reference and learn new words, but also to interpret and respond to user CRs, with both capabilities integrated within the standard dialogue processes and governed by empirical evidence.

Causes and strategies for requesting clarification in dialogue

2004

We do two things in this paper. First, we present a model of possible causes for requesting clarifications in dialogue, i.e., we classify types of non-understandings that lead to clarifications. For this we make more precise the models of communication of and , relating them to an independently motivated theory of discourse semantics, SDRT (Asher and Lascarides, 2003). As we show, the lack of such a model is a problem for extant analyses of clarification moves. Second, we combine this model with an extended notion of "confidence score" that combines speech recognition confidence with different kinds of semantic and pragmatic confidence, and argue that the resulting processing model can produce a more natural clarification and confirmation behaviour than that of current dialogue systems. We close with a description of an experimental implementation of the model.

Implications for generating clarification requests in task-oriented dialogues

Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting on …, 2005

Clarification requests (CRs) in conversation ensure and maintain mutual understanding and thus play a crucial role in robust dialogue interaction. In this paper, we describe a corpus study of CRs in task-oriented dialogue and compare our findings to those reported in two prior studies. We find that CR behavior in task-oriented dialogue differs significantly from that in everyday conversation in a number of ways. Moreover, the dialogue type, the modality and the channel quality all influence the decision of when to clarify and at which level of the grounding process. Finally we identify formfunction correlations which can inform the generation of CRs.

Experimenting with clarification in dialogue

2003

A new technique for integrating experimental manipulations into text-based, synchronous dialogue is introduced. This method supports fine-grained, systematic transformation of conversational turns and the introduction of 'artificial' probe turns and turn sequences. It can be used to introduce manipulations that are sensitive to aspects of the local linguistic and conversational context for any task or dialogue type. The use of this technique is illustrated by an experimental investigation of the effect of word category and level of grounding on the interpretation of reprise clarifications. The results show that these factors affect both the type and likelihood of response to reprise fragment clarifications.

Confidence-Based Fragmentary Clarifications on Several Levels for Robust Dialogue Systems

2004

In this thesis, I present strategies to improve the robustness and naturalness of dialogue systems by asking fragmentary Clarification Requests (CRs) on several levels according to Confidence Scores. In a corpus study I gather evidence how clarifications are realised in humanhuman communication. I demonstrate how different functions of CRs map on surface forms for the travel booking domain, and what kind of grounding strategy should be prefered for task-oriented dialogues. Based on these results, I sketch a prototype dialogue system how to generate fragmentary clarifications on several levels. Finally, I am discussing the problem of asking multiple Clarification Requests concerning one utterance.

Confidence-based fragmentary clarification on several levels for robust dialogue systems

2004

Form, intonation and function of clarification requests in German task-oriented spoken dialogues

2004

We present a classification-scheme for describing the form (including intonation) and function of clarification requests (CRs) that is more fine-grained than extant classifications, and a study of a corpus of German task-oriented dialogues where we used this scheme to annotate the occuring CRs. Among the correlations between form and function we found was a hitherto undescribed correlation between intonation of CRs and their interpretation, which could possibly aid dialogue systems in interpreting CRs.

On the Means for Clarification in Dialogue (original) (raw)

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