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

Prosodic Synchrony for Error Management in Human-Computer Interaction

Noriko Suzuki, Yasuhiro Katagiri

ATR Media Information Science Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan

This paper presents a new direction for managing the speech recognition errors of a computer with spoken dialogue functions. Our approach uses an implicit control of human voice prosody by focusing on human behavior characteristics, i.e., interactional synchrony at the prosodic level as one of errorprevention methods. In this paper, we introduce a simple experiment to examine the same prosodic synchrony between a subject and a computer at the same acoustic power level as that in human-human conversation. Consequently, we obtained the asymmetric results: subjects follow the change in sound power level in a computer voice when it's in the increasing direction but not in the decreasing direction.

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Bibliographic reference.  Suzuki, Noriko / Katagiri, Yasuhiro (2003): "Prosodic synchrony for error management in human-computer interaction", In EHSD-2003, 107-111.