4.1.3 General Dialogue characteristics: Examples

Some examples.

This was a bit abstract. So next, let's look at some examples.

A asks a question and that signals a point where the turn passes on to B. Since there is a significant amount of time where no response is produced by B, A reclaims the turn and repeats the question. That happens twice, until B actually responds.

One of the commonest adjacency pairs is the question-answer pair. This means that whenever a question has been asked, an answer is to be expected, or is appropriate. In this example, B does not answer the question A has asked. That, however, is all right, since B is not ignoring the question. He is just initiating a sub-dialogue in order to clarify the reasons as to A's asking the question and be able to better respond.

A gives a departure date. B briefly states what he has understood the departing date to be and goes ahead to give the details of the itinerary on that date.

What if A changed his mind and wanted to take a later flight, after all?

Or, if the system hadn't understood him correctly, for example, due to mis-hearing?

A dialogue system must be able to deal with these cases, especially as with the current state of the art in speech recognition there is a lot of room for misrecognition. That means, that the system should be able to delete information and resume the dialogue at the right point.

B gives an answer which is not at first glance relevant to A's assertion that the telephone is ringing. If interpreted in context, though, A's original assertion must have also been a prompt for B to pick the telephone up. Therefore, B's utterance is interpreted as stating B's inability to pick up the phone. This particular example requires a lot of world knowledge as well as dialogue context to be taken into account. World knowledge, for instance, is used when A realises that B cannot pick up the phone. A is aware of the fact that getting out of the bath is not what most people enjoy doing in order to answer a telephone call.

B is able from the fragmentary response ``Friday'', to reconstruct the semantics of something like ``I want to travel on Friday''.

B is able to map ``vehicles'' onto the vehicles in Penfield or near Penfield, as A has previously specified the place where the woman has to be transfered from to be Penfield and, thus, that that will be the place of departure. B also infers that the vehicles should be ambulances, since this kind of vehicle is normally used for transferring people. The interpretation here is made easier because B can also infer that the woman is injured, given the domain. This example is taken from the TRIPS system, a quite sophisticated system which we will look at briefly later in this lecture.

A's suggestion to use the particular ambulances makes the system infer that Route 96 needs to be used. Thereupon, it takes the initiative and informs A that that route is blocked, implying that it is not a good choice. In the final turn, A takes the initiative again. It offers to dispatch the crew of the ambulance once the route has been decided on.