Evaluating a City Exploration Dialogue System with Integrated Question-Answering and Pedestrian Navigation

Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1660–1668, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9 2013. c⃝2013 Association for Computational Linguistics Evaluating a City Exploration Dialogue System Combining Question-Answering and Pedestrian Navigation Srinivasan Janarthanam1, Oliver Lemon1, Phil Bartie2, Tiphaine Dalmas2, Anna Dickinson2, Xingkun Liu1, William Mackaness2, and Bonnie Webber2 1 The Interaction Lab, Heriot-Watt University 2 Edinburgh University sc445@hw.ac.uk Abstract We present a city navigation and tourist information mobile dialogue app with in- tegrated question-answering (QA) and ge- ographic information system (GIS) mod- ules that helps pedestrian users to nav- igate in and learn about urban environ- ments. In contrast to existing mobile apps which treat these problems independently, our Android app addresses the prob- lem of navigation and touristic question- answering in an integrated fashion using a shared dialogue context. We evaluated our system in comparison with Samsung S-Voice (which interfaces to Google nav- igation and Google search) with 17 users and found that users judged our system to be significantly more interesting to inter- act with and learn from. They also rated our system above Google search (with the Samsung S-Voice interface) for tourist in- formation tasks. 1 Introduction We present a mobile dialogue system (an Android app) called Spacebook that addresses the problem of pedestrian navigation and tourist information in urban environments. There has been little prior work that addresses these two problems - naviga- tion and tourist information provision - in an inte- grated way. By navigation, we refer to the prob- lem of finding appropriate destinations to go to and the task of wayfinding to reach them and by tourist information provision we refer to the prob- lem of meeting the informational needs of a user about entities such as museums, statues and fa- mous personalities. A dialogue system such as this could serve as a personal tour guide to pedestrian tourists as they walk around unknown cities. With the proliferation of smartphones, there has been a number of mobile apps developed to address these problems. However these apps have the following problems: first, they demand the user’s visual at- tention because they predominantly present infor- mation on a mobile screen. This can be dangerous in urban environments, as well as being distract- ing. Second, these apps address the problems of navigation and tourist information independently and therefore do not have a shared interaction con- text. This means that users cannot switch between information and navigation tasks in a natural and fluid manner. User1: Take me to the National Museum. System2: The National Museum is about 300m away.. System3: At the KFC, turn left on to South Bridge System4 : Near you is the statue of David Hume. User2: Who is David Hume. System5: David Hume was a Scottish philosopher.... User3: Tell me more about David Hume. System6: He was one of the most important figures in.. System7: You should be able to see the museum ... User4: Tell me more about the museum. System8: The National Museum of Scotland is a.... …

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