Taking the Turn — Or Not: Turn Management in Spoken Dialogue Systems

Julia Hirschberg

Julia Hirschberg Maxine S. Eskenazi received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern Languages from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1973. She received her DEA (Diplome d'Etudes Approfondies - equiv. Masters) in Linguistics from the University of Paris VII in 1981 and her Doctorat de Troisieme Cycle in Computer Science from the University of Paris XI in 1984. Her thesis was on "Caracterisation acoustique des voyelles francaises en vue de leur reconnaissance automatique" and her thesis advisor was Jean-Sylvain Lienard. She has been President and Chief Technical Officer of the Carnegie Speech™ Company (2001 - ). Carnegie Speech™ is a CMU spinoff. She is presently Associate Teaching Professor in the Language Technologies Institute of the School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University. From 1980 to 1994 she worked as a grad student and then a tenured researcher at LIMSI-CNRS in Orsay, France.

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Date

• 15:00, Friday, July 17^th, 2009
• Room 336

Speaker

• Julia Hirschberg, KTH (Sweden) and Columbia University (USA)

Abstract

Listeners have many options in dialogue: They may interrupt the current speaker, take the turn after the speaker has finished, remain silent and wait for the speaker to continue, or backchannel, to indicate that they are still listening -- without taking the turn I will discuss three of these options which are particularly difficult, yet particularly important, for systems to distinguish in Spoken Dialogue Systems: taking the turn vs. backchanneling vs. remaining silent and letting the speaker continue. How can the system determine which option the user is choosing? How can the system decide which option it should choose and how best to signal this to the user? I will describe results of an empirical study of these phenomena in the context of a larger study of human-human turn-taking behavior in the Columbia Games Corpus. This is joint work with Agustín Gravano (University of Buenos Aires).