Construction of Back-Channel Utterance Corpus for Responsive Spoken Dialogue System Development

Yuki Kamiya, Tomohiro Ohno, Shigeki Matsubara, Hideki Kashioka


Abstract
In spoken dialogues, if a spoken dialogue system does not respond at all during user’s utterances, the user might feel uneasy because the user does not know whether or not the system has recognized the utterances. In particular, back-channel utterances, which the system outputs as voices such as “yeah” and “uh huh” in English have important roles for a driver in in-car speech dialogues because the driver does not look owards a listener while driving. This paper describes construction of a back-channel utterance corpus and its analysis to develop the system which can output back-channel utterances at the proper timing in the responsive in-car speech dialogue. First, we constructed the back-channel utterance corpus by integrating the back-channel utterances that four subjects provided for the driver’s utterances in 60 dialogues in the CIAIR in-car speech dialogue corpus. Next, we analyzed the corpus and revealed the relation between back-channel utterance timings and information on bunsetsu, clause, pause and rate of speech. Based on the analysis, we examined the possibility of detecting back-channel utterance timings by machine learning technique. As the result of the experiment, we confirmed that our technique achieved as same detection capability as a human.
Anthology ID:
L10-1176
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/260_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuki Kamiya, Tomohiro Ohno, Shigeki Matsubara, and Hideki Kashioka. 2010. Construction of Back-Channel Utterance Corpus for Responsive Spoken Dialogue System Development. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Construction of Back-Channel Utterance Corpus for Responsive Spoken Dialogue System Development (Kamiya et al., LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/260_Paper.pdf