Pardon the Interruption: Managing Turn-Taking through Overlap Resolution in Embodied Artificial Agents

Felix Gervits, Matthias Scheutz


Abstract
Speech overlap is a common phenomenon in natural conversation and in task-oriented interactions. As human-robot interaction (HRI) becomes more sophisticated, the need to effectively manage turn-taking and resolve overlap becomes more important. In this paper, we introduce a computational model for speech overlap resolution in embodied artificial agents. The model identifies when overlap has occurred and uses timing information, dialogue history, and the agent’s goals to generate context-appropriate behavior. We implement this model in a Nao robot using the DIARC cognitive robotic architecture. The model is evaluated on a corpus of task-oriented human dialogue, and we find that the robot can replicate many of the most common overlap resolution behaviors found in the human data.
Anthology ID:
W18-5011
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
99–109
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-5011
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-5011
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Felix Gervits and Matthias Scheutz. 2018. Pardon the Interruption: Managing Turn-Taking through Overlap Resolution in Embodied Artificial Agents. In Proceedings of the 19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 99–109, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Pardon the Interruption: Managing Turn-Taking through Overlap Resolution in Embodied Artificial Agents (Gervits & Scheutz, SIGDIAL 2018)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/paclic-22-ingestion/W18-5011.pdf
Attachment:
 W18-5011.Attachment.mp4