Utterance Units in Spoken Dialogue

In order to make spoken dialogue systems more sophisticated, designers need to better understand the conventions that people use in structuring their speech and in interacting with their fellow conversants. In particular, it is crucial to discriminate the basic building blocks of dialogue and how they affect the way people process language. Many researchers have proposed the utterance unit as the primary object of study, but defining exactly what this is has remained a difficult issue. To shed light on this question, we consider grounding behavior in dialogue, and examine co-occurrences between turn-initial grounding acts and utterance unit boundary signals that have been proposed in the literature, namely prosodic boundary tones and pauses. Preliminary results indicate high correlation between grounding and boundary tones, with a secondary correlation for longer pauses. We also consider some of the dialogue processing issues which are impacted by a definition of utterance unit.