Disfluent but effective? A quantitative study of disfluencies and conversational moves in team discourse

Felix Gervits, Kathleen Eberhard, Matthias Scheutz


Abstract
Situated dialogue systems that interact with humans as part of a team (e.g., robot teammates) need to be able to use information from communication channels to gauge the coordination level and effectiveness of the team. Currently, the feasibility of this end goal is limited by several gaps in both the empirical and computational literature. The purpose of this paper is to address those gaps in the following ways: (1) investigate which properties of task-oriented discourse correspond with effective performance in human teams, and (2) discuss how and to what extent these properties can be utilized in spoken dialogue systems. To this end, we analyzed natural language data from a unique corpus of spontaneous, task-oriented dialogue (CReST corpus), which was annotated for disfluencies and conversational moves. We found that effective teams made more self-repair disfluencies and used specific communication strategies to facilitate grounding and coordination. Our results indicate that truly robust and natural dialogue systems will need to interpret highly disfluent utterances and also utilize specific collaborative mechanisms to facilitate grounding. These data shed light on effective communication in performance scenarios and directly inform the development of robust dialogue systems for situated artificial agents.
Anthology ID:
C16-1317
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
3359–3369
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1317
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Felix Gervits, Kathleen Eberhard, and Matthias Scheutz. 2016. Disfluent but effective? A quantitative study of disfluencies and conversational moves in team discourse. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 3359–3369, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Disfluent but effective? A quantitative study of disfluencies and conversational moves in team discourse (Gervits et al., COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1317.pdf