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

The Impact of Response Wording in Error Correction Subdialogs

Julie Goldberg (1), Mari Ostendorf (2), Katrin Kirchhoff (2)

(1) Computer Science & Engineering, (2) Electrical Engineering Departments, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

Spoken human-machine dialogs are prone to communication failures due to imperfect speech recognition and understanding. In order to recover from these failures, users typically engage in error correction subdialogs. Lengthy error correction subdialogs should be avoided since they increase the overall task completion time and decrease user satisfaction. This study analyzes a large corpus of human-computer dialogs and identifies properties of system responses that affect user frustration and recognition error rates in error correction subdialogs.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Goldberg, Julie / Ostendorf, Mari / Kirchhoff, Katrin (2003): "The impact of response wording in error correction subdialogs", In EHSD-2003, 101-106.