AGILE Workshop on Adaptation in Spatial Communication

When conveying information about spatial situations and goals, speakers adapt flexibly to their addressee. Our aim is to equip our dialogue system with the communicative abilities required for such a natural, adaptive dialogue. In this paper we investigate how humans react to other humans and to a dialogue system when giving route descriptions with a map. We focus on two aspects of spatial language known to be crucial for navigation: perspective choice and references to places across levels of granularity. The results of two studies involving human-human and human-system interaction show that humans adapt to their interaction partner systematically with respect to both.