Error Handling in Spoken Dialogue Systems August 28-31, 2003 Château d'Oex, Vaud, Switzerland

The Error Is the Clue: Breakdown In Human-Machine Interaction

Bilyana Martinovsky, David Traum

Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA, USA

This paper focuses not on the detection and correction of specific errors in the interaction between machines and humans, but rather cases of massive deviation from the user's conversational expectations and desires. This can be the result of too many or too unusual errors, but also from dialogue strategies designed to minimize error, which make the interaction unnatural in other ways. We study causes of irritation such as over-fragmentation, over-clarity, overcoordination, over-directedness, and repetitiveness of verbal action, syntax, and intonation. Human reactions to these irritating features typically appear in the following order: tiredness, tolerance, anger, confusion, irony, humor, exhaustion, uncertainty, lack of desire to communicate. The studied features of human expressions of irritation in non-face-to-face interaction are: intonation, emphatic speech, elliptic speech, speed of speech, extra-linguistic signs, speed of verbal action, and overlap.

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Bibliographic reference.  Martinovsky, Bilyana / Traum, David (2003): "The error is the clue: breakdown in human-machine interaction", In EHSD-2003, 11-16.