Identifying Repair Targets in Action Control Dialogue

Identifying Repair Targets in Action Control Dialogue Kotaro Funakoshi and Takenobu Tokunaga Department of Computer Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology 2-12-1 Oookayama Meguro, Tokyo, JAPAN {koh,take}@cl.cs.titech.ac.jp Abstract This paper proposes a method for deal- ing with repairs in action control dialogue to resolve participants’ misunderstanding. The proposed method identifies the re- pair target based on common grounding rather than surface expressions. We extend Traum’s grounding act model by introduc- ing degree of groundedness, and partial and mid-discourse unit grounding. This paper contributes to achieving more natu- ral human-machine dialogue and instanta- neous and flexible control of agents. 1 Introduction In natural language dialogue, misunderstanding and its resolution is inevitable for the natural course of dialogue. The past research dealing with misunderstanding has been focused on the di- alogue involving only utterances. In this paper, we discuss misunderstanding problem in the di- alogue involving participant’s actions as well as utterances. In particular, we focus on misunder- standing in action control dialogue. Action control dialogue is a kind of task- oriented dialogue in which a commander con- trols the actions1 of other agents called followers through verbal interaction. This paper deals with disagreement repair ini- tiation utterances2 (DRIUs) which are used by commanders to resolve followers’ misunderstand- ings3, or to correct commanders’ previous erro- neous utterances. These are so called third-turn 1We use the term “action” for the physical behavior of agents except for speaking. 2This denomination is lengthy and may be still controver- sial. However we think this is most descriptively adequate for the moment. 3Misunderstanding is a state where miscommunication has occurred but participants are not aware of this, at least initially (Hirst et al., 1994). repair (Schegloff, 1992). Unlike in ordinary dia- logue consisting of only utterances, in action con- trol dialogue, followers’ misunderstanding could be manifested as their inappropriate actions in re- sponse to a given command. Let us look at a sample dialogue (1.1 – 1.3). Ut- terance (1.3) is a DRIU for repairing V’s mis- understanding of command (1.1) which is mani- fested by his action performed after saying “OK” in (1.2). (1.1) U: Put the red book on the shelf to the right. (1.2) V: OK. <V performs the action> (1.3) U: Not that. It is not easy for machine agents to under- stand DRIUs because they can sometimes be so elliptical and context-dependent that it is difficult to apply traditional interpretation methodology to DRIUs. In the rest of this paper, we describe the dif- ficulty of understanding DRIUs and propose a method to identify repair targets. The identifica- tion of repair targets plays a key role in under- standing DRIUs and this paper is intensively fo- cused on this issue. 2 Difficulty of Understanding DRIUs Understanding a DRIU consists of repair tar- get identification and repair content interpretation. Repair target identification identifies a target to be repaired by the speaker’s utterance. Repair con- tent interpretation recovers the speaker’s intention by replacing the identified repair target with the correct one. One of the major source …

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