@inproceedings{mizumoto-etal-2024-dialogue,
    title = "Dialogue Systems Can Generate Appropriate Responses without the Use of Question Marks?{--} a Study of the Effects of {``}?{''} for Spoken Dialogue Systems {--}",
    author = "Mizumoto, Tomoya  and
      Yamazaki, Takato  and
      Yoshikawa, Katsumasa  and
      Ohagi, Masaya  and
      Kawamoto, Toshiki  and
      Sato, Toshinori",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.435",
    pages = "4858--4864",
    abstract = "When individuals engage in spoken discourse, various phenomena can be observed that differ from those that are apparent in text-based conversation. While written communication commonly uses a question mark to denote a query, in spoken discourse, queries are frequently indicated by a rising intonation at the end of a sentence. However, numerous speech recognition engines do not append a question mark to recognized queries, presenting a challenge when creating a spoken dialogue system. Specifically, the absence of a question mark at the end of a sentence can impede the generation of appropriate responses to queries in spoken dialogue systems. Hence, we investigate the impact of question marks on dialogue systems, with the results showing that they have a significant impact. Moreover, we analyze specific examples in an effort to determine which types of utterances have the impact on dialogue systems.",
}

When individuals engage in spoken discourse, various phenomena can be observed that differ from those that are apparent in text-based conversation. While written communication commonly uses a question mark to denote a query, in spoken discourse, queries are frequently indicated by a rising intonation at the end of a sentence. However, numerous speech recognition engines do not append a question mark to recognized queries, presenting a challenge when creating a spoken dialogue system. Specifically, the absence of a question mark at the end of a sentence can impede the generation of appropriate responses to queries in spoken dialogue systems. Hence, we investigate the impact of question marks on dialogue systems, with the results showing that they have a significant impact. Moreover, we analyze specific examples in an effort to determine which types of utterances have the impact on dialogue systems.
Mizumoto, Tomoya Yamazaki, Takato Yoshikawa, Katsumasa Ohagi, Masaya Kawamoto, Toshiki Sato, Toshinori
Dialogue Systems Can Generate Appropriate Responses without the Use of Question Marks?– a Study of the Effects of “?” for Spoken Dialogue Systems –