Tagging Communication Problems in Spoken Dialogue Systems: On-line or Off-line?

The paper describes our work on tagging communication problems in humancomputer shared-goal spoken dialogues. The coding scheme is not otherwise restricted to a particular task or domain. The tag-set is rooted in a set of co-operativity guidelines. Tagging is done off-line at design time. The purpose is to discover problems early in the dialogue development process in order to prevent them from occurring in later versions of the dialogue. We describe the coding scheme and its application and discuss the issue of on-line versus off-line tagging of communication problems.