HANDLING OF USER INTERRUPTION TO ACHIEVE TIMING-FREE UTTERANCES FOR SPOKEN DIALOGUE INTERFACE

This paper considers the spoken dialogue interface, which is the basic system for the multimodal interface by speech, and discusses the hand ling of the interruption that ensures the user the timing-free utteran ces. In the interruption by the user, if the utterance by the system i s designed with the sentence as; the unit, as in the conventional syst em, there will be produced a difference between the designed content o f the utterance and the actually uttered content or the content receiv ed by the user. From such a viewpoint, the following method is propose d. The unit for the utterance planning is defined as the information t o be transmitted by a sentence, and which information is received is a lways monitored through the management of the turn-taking between the speakers of the dialogue. As a result of experiment, the handling of s mooth interruption is recognized in more than half the subjects, Using the proposed method, the difference between the utterance planned by the system and the utterance received by the user is reduced. It is ve rified also that the interface is made more convenient by the handling of the interruption. The time required for the user to complete the t ask is reduced try 7 percent, and the number of positive topic proposa ls is increased by 21 percent.