Attentive listening system with backchanneling, response generation and flexible turn-taking

Divesh Lala, Pierrick Milhorat, Koji Inoue, Masanari Ishida, Katsuya Takanashi, Tatsuya Kawahara


Abstract
Attentive listening systems are designed to let people, especially senior people, keep talking to maintain communication ability and mental health. This paper addresses key components of an attentive listening system which encourages users to talk smoothly. First, we introduce continuous prediction of end-of-utterances and generation of backchannels, rather than generating backchannels after end-point detection of utterances. This improves subjective evaluations of backchannels. Second, we propose an effective statement response mechanism which detects focus words and responds in the form of a question or partial repeat. This can be applied to any statement. Moreover, a flexible turn-taking mechanism is designed which uses backchannels or fillers when the turn-switch is ambiguous. These techniques are integrated into a humanoid robot to conduct attentive listening. We test the feasibility of the system in a pilot experiment and show that it can produce coherent dialogues during conversation.
Anthology ID:
W17-5516
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Saarbrücken, Germany
Editors:
Kristiina Jokinen, Manfred Stede, David DeVault, Annie Louis
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
127–136
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5516
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-5516
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Divesh Lala, Pierrick Milhorat, Koji Inoue, Masanari Ishida, Katsuya Takanashi, and Tatsuya Kawahara. 2017. Attentive listening system with backchanneling, response generation and flexible turn-taking. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 127–136, Saarbrücken, Germany. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Attentive listening system with backchanneling, response generation and flexible turn-taking (Lala et al., SIGDIAL 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5516.pdf