Could you spell that again please? Towards a formal model of grounding in directory enquiries

Abstract:

Based on a corpus of directory enquiries dialogue and a preliminary analysis of dialogue act sequences involved in spelling out names in these dialogues, we provide the basic components of an incremental computational account of grounding of names. The account is inspired by previous work on a computational model for incremental processing that has previously been applied to number sequences. Here, we tackle the issue of the spelling out of names, where more complex behaviours are involved, mixing fully read out names, partially spelled names, clarification requests, and more. This model has a potential application in designing conversational agents that can handle previously unencountered names with possibly idiosyncratic spellings.

Research areas:

• Dialogue
• Repair
• Dialogue modelling

Year:

2020

Type of Publication:

In Proceedings

Book title:

First AISB Symposium on Conversational AI (SoCAI)