Reducing Miscommunication in Spoken Human-Machine Dialogue

This paper presents a principled approach to reducing the occurrence of communication failure in spoken language dialogue systems. A set of principles for cooperative human-machine dialogue has been developed based on the development of the dialogue component of a spoken language dialogue system and on human-human dialogue theory. The principles have been tested on the dialogue corpus from a controlled user test of the implemented system. The paper demonstrates how the principles enabled systematic classification and analysis of the user test data on system miscommunication. In addition, the user test confirmed the broad scope of the principles as only minor additions and revisions were needed to provide a complete classification of the test data. The principles may have other uses in addition to that of test data analysis and dialogue evaluation. Potentially, they might serve as guidelines for the design of cooperative dialogue during early dialogue design.