Toward a Model for Incremental Grounding in Spoken Dialogue Systems

Recent advances in incremental language processing for dialogue systems promise to enable more natural conversation between humans and computers. By analyzing the user’s utterance while it is still in progress, systems can provide more human-like overlapping and backchannel responses to convey their level of understanding and respond more quickly. In this paper, we look at examples of several overlapping response types in human-human dialogues, and present an initial computational model of the incremental grounding process in these responses. Additionally, we describe an implementation of this model in a virtual human dialogue system that can provide backchannels, head nods, frowns, completions and low latency responses