It’s About Time: Turn-Entry Timing For Situated Human-Robot Dialogue

Felix Gervits, Ravenna Thielstrom, Antonio Roque, Matthias Scheutz


Abstract
Turn-entry timing is an important requirement for conversation, and one that spoken dialogue systems largely fail at. In this paper, we introduce a computational framework based on work from Psycholinguistics, which is aimed at achieving proper turn-taking timing for situated agents. The approach involves incremental processing and lexical prediction of the turn in progress, which allows a situated dialogue system 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 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 transition point or earlier to produce several types of overlap, and 3) the system is robust to various forms of disfluency in the input. Overall, this domain-independent framework can be integrated into various dialogue systems to improve responsiveness, and is a step toward more natural, human-like turn-taking behavior.
Anthology ID:
2020.sigdial-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
1st virtual meeting
Editors:
Olivier Pietquin, Smaranda Muresan, Vivian Chen, Casey Kennington, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Koji Inoue, Erik Ekstedt, Stefan Ultes
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
86–96
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.12
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.sigdial-1.12
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Felix Gervits, Ravenna Thielstrom, Antonio Roque, and Matthias Scheutz. 2020. It’s About Time: Turn-Entry Timing For Situated Human-Robot Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 86–96, 1st virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
It’s About Time: Turn-Entry Timing For Situated Human-Robot Dialogue (Gervits et al., SIGDIAL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.12.pdf
Video:
 https://youtube.com/watch?v=xUWAxoIuf4o