Dialogue Systems Can Generate Appropriate Responses without the Use of Question Marks?– a Study of the Effects of “?” for Spoken Dialogue Systems –

Tomoya Mizumoto, Takato Yamazaki, Katsumasa Yoshikawa, Masaya Ohagi, Toshiki Kawamoto, Toshinori Sato


Abstract
When individuals engage in spoken discourse, various phenomena can be observed that differ from those that are apparent in text-based conversation. While written communication commonly uses a question mark to denote a query, in spoken discourse, queries are frequently indicated by a rising intonation at the end of a sentence. However, numerous speech recognition engines do not append a question mark to recognized queries, presenting a challenge when creating a spoken dialogue system. Specifically, the absence of a question mark at the end of a sentence can impede the generation of appropriate responses to queries in spoken dialogue systems. Hence, we investigate the impact of question marks on dialogue systems, with the results showing that they have a significant impact. Moreover, we analyze specific examples in an effort to determine which types of utterances have the impact on dialogue systems.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.435
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
4858–4864
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.435
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tomoya Mizumoto, Takato Yamazaki, Katsumasa Yoshikawa, Masaya Ohagi, Toshiki Kawamoto, and Toshinori Sato. 2024. Dialogue Systems Can Generate Appropriate Responses without the Use of Question Marks?– a Study of the Effects of “?” for Spoken Dialogue Systems –. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 4858–4864, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Dialogue Systems Can Generate Appropriate Responses without the Use of Question Marks?– a Study of the Effects of “?” for Spoken Dialogue Systems – (Mizumoto et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.435.pdf