GRICE INCORPORATED: Cooperativity in Spoken Dialogue

GRICE INCORPORATED Cooperativity in Spoken Dialogue Laila Dybkj~er, Niels Ole Bernsen and Hans Dybkj~er Centre for Cognitive Science, Roskilde University PO Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark emails: laila@cog.ruc.dk, nob@cog.ruc.dk, dybkjaer@cog.ruc.dk phone: +45 46 75 77 l 1 fax: +45 46 75 45 02 Abstract The paper presents a consolidated set of princip- les of cooperative spoken human-machine dialo- gue which have the potential tor being turned into practically applicable design guidelines. The principles have been validated in three ways. They were established fi'om a Wizard of Oz sim- ulation corpus used to develop the dialogue model for a spoken language dialogue system. Developed independently of Gricean theory, some of the principles were refined through com- parison with Grice's maxims of cooperativity in conversation. Finally, the principles were tested in the user test of the implemented dialogue sys- tem. The paper shows that Grice's maxims con- stitute a sub-set of the principles. The non- Gricean principles and dialogue aspects they in- troduce am presented and discussed. 1 Introduction In the last four years, we have designed and imple- mented the dialogue component of a spoken language dialogue system (SLDS) prototype in the domain of flight ticket reservation. The aim has been to develop a realistic, application-oriented prototype whose dia- logue management allows users to perform their res- ervation task in spontaneous and natural spoken lan- guage. Being well-structured, the ticket reservation task generally lends itself to system-directed dialogue in which the user answers questions posed by the system. The only user initiative our system permits is that users may initiate clarification and repair meta- communication through uttering the keywords 'repeat' and 'change'. In designing such a system, it is crucial to reduce the number of situations in which users are inclined to take other forms of dialogue initiative, such as asking questions when they do not understand the system's dialogue behaviour or pro- viding information which the system did not ask for (Schegloff et al, 1977). This is why the issue of dia- logue cooperativity came to play a central role in our design of the dialogue structure. We needed to opti- mist system dialogue cooperativity in order to pre- vent situations such as those described above. To this end, we developed a set of general principles to be observed in the design of cooperative, spoken human- machine dialogue. The principles have been validated in three ways. Firstly, they were developed on the basis of a simulated human-nmchine dialogue corpus collected during dialogue model design. Secondly, we compared the principles with Grice's maxims of co- operative human-human dialogue. Thirdly, the prin- ciples were tested against the dialogue corpus fi'om the user test of the implemented system. This paper analyses the relationship between our principles and Grice's maxims. We first describe how the principles were developed (Section 2). We then justify the comparison between principles and max- ires (Section 3). Section 4 compares principles and maxims. Section 5 briefly describes how the princi- ples were tested the on user test dialogue corpus, …

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