Using the Process of Distilling Dialogues to Understand Dialogue Systems
Staffan Larsson, Lena Santamarta, Arne Jönsson · 2000
Distilled dialogues, i.e. re-written natural dialogues, are a useful complement to dialogues collected in Wizard of Oz-experiments or in natural settings for development of dialogue systems. However, the distillation process itself also provides insights on human-computer interaction and on properties of dialogue systems. In this paper we present the distillation process, including how the guidelines are developed, and experiences from utilising distillation. 1. INTRODUCTION Development of dialogue systems requires knowledge on how potential users would like to interact with the system. Such knowledge is often acquired from analyses of corpora of various kinds. The two most common types of corpora are natural dialogues, collected in real settings where humans communicate in a situation similar to the one that the dialogue system is to account for, and humancomputer dialogues collected in Wizard of Oz-experiments, where whole, or parts, of the dialogue system is simulated by a human i...