Error-correction detection and response generation in a spoken dialogue system

Speech understanding errors in spoken dialogue systems can be frustrating for users and difficult to recover from in a mixed-initiative spoken dialogue system. Handling such errors requires both detecting error conditions and adjusting the response generation strategy accordingly. In this paper, we show that different response wording choices tend to be associated with different user behaviors that can impact word recognition performance in a telephone-based dialogue system. We leverage these findings in a system that integrates an error correction detection module with a modified dialogue strategy in order to drive the response generation module. In a user study, we find slight preferences for a dialogue system using this error handling strategy over a simple reprompting strategy.