It’s About Time: Turn-Entry Timing For Situated Human-Robot Dialogue
Felix Gervits, Ravenna Thielstrom, Antônio C. Roque, Matthias J. Scheutz · 2020
Turn-entry timing is an important requirement for conversation, and one that few spoken dialogue systems consider.In this paper we introduce a computational framework, based on work from psycholinguistics, which is aimed at achieving proper turn-entry timing for situated agents.Our approach involves incremental processing and lexical prediction of the turn in progress, which allows a situated dialogue agent to start its turn and initiate actions earlier than would otherwise be possible.We evaluate the framework by integrating it within a cognitive robotic architecture and testing performance on a corpus of situated, task-oriented human-robot directives.We demonstrate that: 1) the system is superior to a non-incremental system in terms of faster responses, reduced gap between turns, and the ability to perform actions early, 2) the system can time its turn to come in immediately at a turn transition, or earlier to produce several types of overlap, and 3) the system is robust to various forms of disfluency in the input.Overall, this domainindependent framework can be integrated into existing dialogue systems to improve responsiveness, and is another step toward more natural and fluid turn-taking behavior.