Now, Where Was I? Resumption Strategies for an In-Vehicle Dialogue System

Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 798–805, Uppsala, Sweden, 11-16 July 2010. c⃝2010 Association for Computational Linguistics Now, where was I? Resumption strategies for an in-vehicle dialogue system Jessica Villing Graduate School of Language Technology and Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science University of Gothenburg jessica@ling.gu.se Abstract In-vehicle dialogue systems often contain more than one application, e.g. a navi- gation and a telephone application. This means that the user might, for example, in- terrupt the interaction with the telephone application to ask for directions from the navigation application, and then resume the dialogue with the telephone applica- tion. In this paper we present an anal- ysis of interruption and resumption be- haviour in human-human in-vehicle dia- logues and also propose some implications for resumption strategies in an in-vehicle dialogue system. 1 Introduction Making it useful and enjoyable to use a dialogue system is always important. The dialogue should be easy and intuitive, otherwise the user will not find it worth the effort and instead prefer to use manual controls or to speak to a human. However, when designing an in-vehicle dia- logue system there is one more thing that needs to be taken into consideration, namely the fact that the user is performing an additional, safety crit- ical, task - driving. The so-called 100-car study (Neale et al., 2005) revealed that secondary task distraction is the largest cause of driver inatten- tion, and that the handling of wireless devices is the most common secondary task. Even if spoken dialogue systems enables manouvering of devices without using hands or eyes, it is crucial to ad- just the interaction to the in-vehicle environment in order to minimize distraction from the interac- tion itself. Therefore the dialogue system should consider the cognitive load of the driver and ad- just the dialogue accordingly. One way of doing this is to continously measure the cognitive work- load level of the driver and, if the workload is high, determine type of workload and act accordingly. If the workload is dialogue-induced (i.e. caused by the dialogue itself), it might be necessary to rephrase or offer the user help with the task. If the workload is driving-induced (i.e. caused by the driving task), the user might need information that is crucial for the driving task (e.g. get nav- igation instructions), or to pause the dialogue in order to enable the user to concentrate on the driv- ing task (Villing, 2009). Both the driver and the system should be able to initiate interruptions. When the interaction with a dialogue system has been interrupted, e.g. because the user has not an- swered a question, it is common that the system returns to the top menu. This means that if the user wants to finish the interrupted task she has to restart from the beginning, which is both time- consuming and annoying. Instead, the dialogue system should be able to either pause until the workload is low or change topic and/or domain, …

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