A System Architecture for Spoken Utterance Production in Collaborative Dialogue

This paper presents a system architecture for producing spoken utterances while collaborating with the human dialogue partner in carrying on a spoken dialogue. The system incrementally produces utterances while managing the responses and interruptions from the human dialogue partner that occur in the middle of the system's utterances. The collaborative principles that the system must use in order to collaborate on a spoken dialogue with the human partner are described. These principles are based on the results of an analysis of the nature and interdependence of utterance units, responses from dialogue partners, and discourse strategies for handling responses in a corpus of spoken dialogues. In particular, it is shown that there are cases where the system has to suspend utterances planned in advance and plan additional utterances to maintain the mutual understanding of exchanges even when the partner does not make any responses. The system has been implemented and the e ects of the principles and system architecture have been evaluated in dialogue simulation experiments.