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A model for incremental grounding in spoken dialogue systems

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Abstract

We present a computational model of incremental grounding, including state updates and action selection. The model is inspired by corpus-based examples of overlapping utterances of several sorts, including backchannels and completions. The model has also been partially implemented within a virtual human system that includes incremental understanding, and can be used to track grounding and provide overlapping verbal and non-verbal behaviors from a listener, before a speaker has completed her utterance.

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Notes

  1. It is sometimes useful to distinguish further between the explicit or predicted surface form, as opposed to the explicit or predicted meaning.

  2. Sometimes, an utterance that includes an acknowledgment will also proceed to initiate a new CGU (as in “okay, so let’s talk about the other matter”).

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Acknowledgments

Some of the effort described here has been sponsored by the US Army. Any opinions, content or information presented does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the United States Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Thomas Visser & Rieks op den Akker

  2. USC Institute for Creative Technologies, Playa Vista, CA, 90092, USA

    David Traum & David DeVault

Authors
  1. Thomas Visser
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  2. David Traum
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  3. David DeVault
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  4. Rieks op den Akker
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Correspondence to David Traum.

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Visser, T., Traum, D., DeVault, D. et al. A model for incremental grounding in spoken dialogue systems. J Multimodal User Interfaces 8, 61–73 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12193-013-0147-7

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