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A General, Abstract Model of Incremental Dialogue Processing

Summary

Dialogue systems that react before a user finishes speaking can produce backchannels like "uh-huh", fast turn-taking, collaborative utterance completion and self-corrections. However, designers had no shared vocabulary for describing how such incremental systems are built. Schlangen and Skantze address this with a conceptual framework rather than a new system or dataset. It defines abstract data types, operations on them and possible constraints on processing modules.

The model describes:

  • the topology of the module network,
  • the direction and "bandwidth" of information flow,
  • the granularity of incremental units (IUs),
  • how a module's input increments relate to its output increments,
  • how hypotheses are revised or committed.

With these notions, one can specify anything from a plain non-incremental pipeline to a fully incremental, asynchronous, parallel and predictive architecture. The authors apply the model to existing systems. They also discuss its use as the basis for inter-module communication, including a compact encoding of updates through positional nodes.

The paper reports no empirical scores. Its contribution is a common descriptive language that makes systems comparable and makes design trade-offs explicit. The authors deliberately avoid recommending one "best" architecture.

Key points

  • Core concept: the incremental unit (IU), the minimal chunk a system processes. IUs can be linguistic (for example, words) or time-based (for example, every 500ms), and they are related to the larger units they belong to.
  • Four dimensions of variation: modularity/topology (pipeline, pipeline with a parallel path, star), granularity, input/output relations, and revisability of hypotheses.
  • Two update schemes: explicit add, revoke and commit messages, or a positional-node network tracked by the pair NC (newest committed) and RE (right edge). The second scheme keeps messages constant in size, lets IUs stay immutable, and ties consumer states to producer states. This is illustrated with an ASR right buffer and a number-word parser.
  • Origin: a revised and substantially extended version of Schlangen and Skantze (2009), published in Dialogue & Discourse 2(1), pp. 83–111, and funded by the DFG Emmy Noether Programme.
  • Future work: covering more existing systems, modelling Levelt's speech generation model, modality fusion, and links to information-state grounding (Larsson and Traum, 2000) via self-corrections.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cited by

86 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 84 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5087/dad.2011.105

@inproceedings{schlangen2011general,
  title = {{A General, Abstract Model of Incremental Dialogue Processing}},
  author = {Schlangen, David and Skantze, Gabriel},
  booktitle = {Dialogue \& Discourse},
  year = {2011},
  doi = {10.5087/dad.2011.105},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5087/dad.2011.105}
}

References

38 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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