SIGDIAL 2009
The 10th Annual SIGDIAL Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

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Analysis of Listening-oriented Dialogue for Building Listening Agents

Toyomi Meguro, Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Kohji Dohsaka, Yasuhiro Minami and Hideki Isozaki

SIGDIAL Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2009)
Queen Mary University of London, September 11-12, 2009

Summary

Our aim is to build listening agents that can attentively listen to the user and satisfy his/her desire to speak and have himself/ herself heard. This paper investigates the characteristics of such listening-oriented dialogues so that such a listening process can be achieved by automated dialogue systems. We collected both listening-oriented dialogues and casual conversation, and analyzed them by comparing the frequency of dialogue acts, as well as the dialogue flows using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). The analysis revealed that listening-oriented dialogues and casual conversation have characteristically different dialogue flows and that the listeners tend to reduce self-disclosure while increasing questions and acknowledgment.