Do You Really Want to Know? Display Questions in Human-Robot Dialogues. A Position Paper

Not all questions are asked with the same intention. Humans tend to address the implicit meaning of the question (that contributes to its pragmatic force), which requires knowledge of the context and a degree of common ground, more so than addressing the explicit propositional content of the question. Is recognizing the pragmatic force in today’s human-robot dialogue systems worth the trouble? We focus on display questions (questions to which the asker already knows the answer) and argue that there are realistic human-robot interaction scenarios in existence today that would benefit from the deeper intention recognition. We also propose a method for obtaining display question annotations by embedding an elicitation question into the dialogue. The preliminary study of our robot receptionist shows that at least 16.7% of interactions with the embedded elicitation question include a display question.