The HIGGINS domain
• The primary domain of HIGGINS is city navigation for pedestrians. • Secondarily, HIGGINS is intended to provide simple information
about the immediate surroundings.
This is a 3D test environment
HIGGINS research issues
• Which factors should govern the dialogue strategy regarding feedback and information detail?– user experience, success, errors, initiative...
• How do different levels of feedback and detail in system responses affect robustness and efficiency of the dialogue?
• How to find and categorise errors– e.g. confidence measures in different system modules
• How should the system act when it doesn't or only partially understands– clarification or "wait and see"
• How does the user's beliefs about the system’s understanding correlate to its actual understanding, depending on error handling strategy?
Error handling
• what should the system do when it understands nothing or just a fragment of the user’s utterance? (non-understanding)
• traditional method– signal non-understanding– encourage the user to repeat
• “I didn’t understand”• “I didn’t hear what you said”
– leads to• hyperarticulation• the user just repeats
Human handling of non-understanding
• Experiment with humans
• Task: navigate in a simulated campus
Vocoder
User Operator
Listens Speaks
ReadsSpeaks ASR
Results• Humans do not often signal non-
understanding (30% of the time).• Instead, they ask questions such as “can you
see a red building?”, confirming a hypothesis about the situation but not about what has been said.
• This leads to faster– error recovery– greater experience of task success
Skantze, "Exploring human error handling strategies: implications for spoken dialogue systems", 2003