Building an Empirically Founded Dialogue System
Thora Tenbrink, Hui Shi, Robert Ross, Elena Andonova, Juliana Goschler, John A. Bateman · 2009
The major aim in our project is to enable flexible dialogue management for intuitive spatial communication. This requires the dynamic negotiation of spatial reference frames, spatial perspectives and discourse strategies. Speakers manage such negotiation by the fine-scale selection and alignment of linguistic forms sensitive to dialogue history, user-group defined norms, and spatial context. Such mechanisms are empirically derived and implemented within our dialogue system for natural interaction in spatiallyembedded tasks. In an iterative and cyclic approach, we combine empirical methods of discourse-analytic and psycholinguistic investigation of dialogue in the spatial domain with formal dialogue modelling and the specification and implementation of a dialogue system. From an empirical point of view, the particular challenge lies in doing adequate justice to the conflicting tensions of, first, eliciting free language production from experimental participants for realistic interactional data, second, enforcing sufficient experimental control to warrant statistically validated claims, and third, evaluating the current state of the system with untrained users interacting intuitively with the system, based on adequately projected discourse aims and tasks. In this paper we introduce our general approach, describe each of the involved research directions and their interrelation, discuss challenges, and highlight ensuing synergies, including the requirement of operationalizing annotation categories precisely. 1