DIUM An Incremental Dialogue Manager That Can Produce Self Corrections
Incremental processing offers the potential for dialogue systems to produce more natural, spontaneous conversational behaviour. This processing strategy comes at a price, though, which is that processing results may have to be revised when more input becomes available. We distinguish between two possible consequences of such revisions: a) If no observable system reaction has been produced yet, revision is just a matter of properly keeping internal state, and can be handled along the lines of the IU model of (Schlangen and Skantze, 2009) b) If however an observable reaction has been produced, revocation itself becomes a dialogue move, and as such must be handled by the dialogue manager. In this paper, we describe a dialogue manager that is capable of doing so, and provide a first discussion of how to handle such self corrections when producing output. This dialogue manager makes a connection between utterance level incrementality and dialogue level incrementality by using concepts from the IU model also internally; we discuss some of the implications of this approach.