Projection of Turn Completion in Incremental Spoken Dialogue Systems

Erik Ekstedt, Gabriel Skantze


Abstract
The ability to take turns in a fluent way (i.e., without long response delays or frequent interruptions) is a fundamental aspect of any spoken dialog system. However, practical speech recognition services typically induce a long response delay, as it takes time before the processing of the user’s utterance is complete. There is a considerable amount of research indicating that humans achieve fast response times by projecting what the interlocutor will say and estimating upcoming turn completions. In this work, we implement this mechanism in an incremental spoken dialog system, by using a language model that generates possible futures to project upcoming completion points. In theory, this could make the system more responsive, while still having access to semantic information not yet processed by the speech recognizer. We conduct a small study which indicates that this is a viable approach for practical dialog systems, and that this is a promising direction for future research.
Anthology ID:
2021.sigdial-1.45
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2021
Address:
Singapore and Online
Editors:
Haizhou Li, Gina-Anne Levow, Zhou Yu, Chitralekha Gupta, Berrak Sisman, Siqi Cai, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Yan Wu, Junyi Jessy Li
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
431–437
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigdial-1.45
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.sigdial-1.45
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Erik Ekstedt and Gabriel Skantze. 2021. Projection of Turn Completion in Incremental Spoken Dialogue Systems. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 431–437, Singapore and Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Projection of Turn Completion in Incremental Spoken Dialogue Systems (Ekstedt & Skantze, SIGDIAL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigdial-1.45.pdf
Video:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfB1gE1wP6Y