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Exploring Multiparty Casual Talk for Social Human-Machine Dialogue

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Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10458))

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Abstract

Much talk between humans is casual and multiparty. It facilitates social bonding and mutual co-presence rather than strictly being used to exchange information in order to complete well-defined practical tasks. Artificial partners that are capable of participating as a speaker or listener in such talk would be useful for companionship, educational, and social contexts. However, such applications require dialogue structure beyond simple question/answer routines. While there is body of theory on multiparty casual talk, there is a lack of work quantifying such phenomena. This is critical if we are to manage and generate human machine multiparty casual talk. We outline the current knowledge on the structure of casual talk, describe our investigations in this domain, summarise our findings on timing, laughter, and disfluency in this domain, and discuss how they can inform the design and implementation of truly social machine dialogue partners.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the European Coordinated Research on Long-term Challenges in Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies ERA-NET (CHISTERA) JOKER project, JOKe and Empathy of a Robot/ECA: Towards social and affective relations with a robot, and by the Speech Communication Lab, Trinity College Dublin, and by Science Foundation Ireland funding for ADAPT (13/RC/2106) at Trinity College Dublin.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

    Emer Gilmartin, Benjamin R. Cowan, Carl Vogel & Nick Campbell

Authors
  1. Emer Gilmartin
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  2. Benjamin R. Cowan
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  3. Carl Vogel
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  4. Nick Campbell
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Emer Gilmartin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. SPIIRAS, Saint Petersburg, Russia

    Alexey Karpov

  2. Moscow State Linguistic University, Moscow, Russia

    Rodmonga Potapova

  3. University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, United Kingdom

    Iosif Mporas

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Gilmartin, E., Cowan, B.R., Vogel, C., Campbell, N. (2017). Exploring Multiparty Casual Talk for Social Human-Machine Dialogue. In: Karpov, A., Potapova, R., Mporas, I. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10458. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66429-3_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66429-3_36

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