Uncertainty in Spoken Dialogue Management

This paper deals with hesitation and uncertainty in spoken dialogue management and discusses communicative signals that are used to express hesitation and uncertainty in conversational interactions. The study focuses especially on the relation between a particular type of gesturing, shoulder shrugging, and speech, and draws conclusions as to how the shoulder shrugging is interpreted by the participants. The analysis includes manual annotation and assumes that dialogues are cooperative activity that is constrained by social obligations and the participants' roles.

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