“Mm, Wat?” Detecting Other-initiated Repair Requests in Dialogue

Anh Ha Ngo, Nicolas Rollet, Catherine Pelachaud, Chloé Clavel


Abstract
Maintaining mutual understanding is a key component in human-human conversation to avoid conversation breakdowns, in which repair, particularly Other-Initiated Repair (OIR, when one speaker signals trouble and prompts the other to resolve), plays a vital role. However, Conversational Agents (CAs) still fail to recognize user repair initiation, leading to breakdowns or disengagement. This work proposes a multimodal model to automatically detect repair initiation in Dutch dialogues by integrating linguistic and prosodic features grounded in Conversation Analysis. The results show that prosodic cues complement linguistic features and significantly improve the results of pretrained text and audio embeddings, offering insights into how different features interact. Future directions include incorporating visual cues, exploring multilingual and cross-context corpora to assess the robustness and generalizability.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1168
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
22937–22950
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1168/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anh Ha Ngo, Nicolas Rollet, Catherine Pelachaud, and Chloé Clavel. 2025. “Mm, Wat?” Detecting Other-initiated Repair Requests in Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 22937–22950, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“Mm, Wat?” Detecting Other-initiated Repair Requests in Dialogue (Ngo et al., EMNLP 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1168.pdf
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