This paper examines feedback strategies in a Swedish corpus of multimodal human--computer interaction. The aim of the study is to investigate how users provide positive and negative feedback to a dialogue system and to discuss the function of these utterances in the dialogues. User feedback in the AdApt corpus was labeled and analyzed, and its distribution in the dialogues is discussed. The question of whether it is possible to utilize user feedback in future systems is considered. More specifically, we discuss how error handling in human--computer dialogue might be improved through greater knowledge of user feedback strategies. In the present corpus, almost all subjects used positive or negative feedback at least once during their interaction with the system. Our results indicate that some types of feedback more often occur in certain positions in the dialogue. Another observation is that there appear to be great individual variations in feedback strategies, so that certain subjects give feedback at almost every turn while others rarely or never respond to a spoken dialogue system in this manner. Finally, we discuss how feedback could be used to prevent problems in human--computer dialogue.
QC 20100611
This thesis presents work done during the last ten years on developing five multimodal spoken dialogue systems, and the empirical user studies that have been conducted with them. The dialogue systems have been multimodal, giving information both verbally with animated talking characters and graphically on maps and in text tables. To be able to study a wider rage of user behaviour each new system has been in a new domain and with a new set of interactional abilities. The five system presented in this thesis are: The Waxholm system where users could ask about the boat traffic in the Stockholm archipelago; the Gulan system where people could retrieve information from the Yellow pages of Stockholm; the August system which was a publicly available system where people could get information about the author Strindberg, KTH and Stockholm; the AdAptsystem that allowed users to browse apartments for sale in Stockholm and the Pixie system where users could help ananimated agent to fix things in a visionary apartment publicly available at the Telecom museum in Stockholm. Some of the dialogue systems have been used in controlled experiments in laboratory environments, while others have been placed inpublic environments where members of the general public have interacted with them. All spoken human-computer interactions have been transcribed and analyzed to increase our understanding of how people interact verbally with computers, and to obtain knowledge on how spoken dialogue systems canutilize the regularities found in these interactions. This thesis summarizes the experiences from building these five dialogue systems and presents some of the findings from the analyses of the collected dialogue corpora.