Turn-taking phenomena in incremental dialogue systems

In this paper, a turn-taking phenomenon taxonomy is introduced, organised accord-ing to the level of information conveyed. It is aimed to provide a better grasp of the behaviours used by humans while talking to each other, so that they can be method-ically replicated in spoken dialogue sys-tems. Five interesting phenomena have been implemented in a simulated environ-ment: the system barge-in with three vari-ants (resulting from either an unclear, an incoherent or a sufficient user message), the feedback and the user barge-in. The experiments reported in the paper illus-trate that how such phenomena are imple-mented is a delicate choice as their impact on the system’s performance is variable.