Recovering from Non-Understanding Errors in a Conversational Dialogue System

Abstract

Spoken dialogue systems can encounter different types of errors, including non-understanding errors where the system recognises that the user has spoken, but does not understand the utterance. Strate-gies for dealing with this kind of error have been proposed and tested in the context of goal-driven dialogue systems, for example by Bohus with a system which helps re-serve conference rooms (Bohus and Rud-nicky, 2005). However there has been lit-tle work on possible strategies in more con-versational settings where the dialogue has more open-ended intentions. This paper looks at recovery from non-understanding errors in the context of a robot tourguide, and tests the strategies in a user trial. The results suggest that it is beneficial for user enjoyment to use strategies which attempt to move the dialogue on, rather than getting caught up in the error by asking users to re-peat themselves. 1