Collaborating on Utterances with a Spoken Dialogue System Using an ISU-based Approach to Incremental Dialogue Management

When dialogue systems, through the use of incremental processing, are not bounded anymore by strict, non-overlapping turn-taking, a whole range of additional interactional devices becomes available. We explore the use of one such device, trial intonation. We elaborate our approach to dialogue management in incremental systems, based on the Information-State-Update approach, and discuss an implementation in a microdomain that lends itself to the use of immediate feedback, trial intonations and expansions. In an overhearer evaluation, the incremental system was judged as significantly more human-like and reactive than a non-incremental version.