Eliciting interactional phenomena in human-human dialogues

Joakim Gustafson and Miray Merkes

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

Summary

In order to build a dialogue system that can interact with humans in the same way as humans interact with each other, it is important to be able to collect conversational data with common interactional phenomena. These data are for example necessary in the development of a conversational speech synthesizer. To date most speech synthesizers are built on read speech, occasionally with tags for some interactional cues like fillers. This paper introduces a recording method where a human operator is able to eavesdrop an ongoing human-human task-oriented dialogue and which allows the operator to give the interlocutors instructions with the purpose of controlling the progression or to elicit interactional phenomena.