Analysis of Child-Caregiver Interactions for Developing a Caregiver Spoken Dialogue System

Sanae Yamashita, Shota Mochizuki, Yuko Kuma, Ray Sakai, Ayaka Sasaki, Ryuichiro Higashinaka


Abstract
We aim to develop a caregiver spoken dialogue system for remote childcare services. As a first step toward this goal, this study investigates how interactions occur between children and caregivers. We collected Japanese child–caregiver dialogue data through a remote childcare service in which participants engaged in activities such as introductions, quizzes, and free conversations. The collected data were analyzed and compared with existing child–caregiver dialogue data from both acoustic and linguistic perspectives. The results showed that, acoustically, child–caregiver dialogues contained fewer overlapping utterances than adult dialogues. Linguistically, the distribution and transitions of utterance intentions differed across dialogue parts, reflecting the diverse structures of each activity. These findings provide useful insights for building future caregiver spoken dialogue systems, suggesting that a turn-based interaction structure may be sufficient and that dialogue control should be adapted to each part of the dialogue.
Anthology ID:
2026.iwsds-1.36
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology
Month:
February
Year:
2026
Address:
Trento, Italy
Editors:
Giuseppe Riccardi, Seyed Mahed Mousavi, Maria Ines Torres, Koichiro Yoshino, Zoraida Callejas, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Yun-Nung Chen, Frederic Bechet, Joakim Gustafson, Géraldine Damnati, Alex Papangelis, Luis Fernando D’Haro, John Mendonça, Raffaella Bernardi, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Giuseppe "Pino" Di Fabbrizio, Tatsuya Kawahara, Firoj Alam, Gokhan Tur, Michael Johnston
Venue:
IWSDS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
357–368
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwsds-1.36/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sanae Yamashita, Shota Mochizuki, Yuko Kuma, Ray Sakai, Ayaka Sasaki, and Ryuichiro Higashinaka. 2026. Analysis of Child-Caregiver Interactions for Developing a Caregiver Spoken Dialogue System. In Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology, pages 357–368, Trento, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Analysis of Child-Caregiver Interactions for Developing a Caregiver Spoken Dialogue System (Yamashita et al., IWSDS 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwsds-1.36.pdf