Clarification in Spoken Dialogue Systems such as in mobile applications often consists of simple requests to “Please repeat” or “Please rephrase” when the system fails to understand a word or phrase. However, human-human dialogues rarely include such questions. When humans ask for clarification of user input such as “I want to travel on XXX”, they typically use targeted clarification questions, such as “When do you want to travel?” However, systems frequently make mistakes when they try to behave more like humans, sometimes asking inappropriate clarification questions. We present research on more human-like clarification behavior based on a series of crowd-sourcing experiments whose results are implemented in a speech-to-speech translation system. We also describe strategies for detecting when our system has asked the ‘wrong’ question of a user, based upon features of the user’s response.

Julia Hirschberg is Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. She worked at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Laboratories -- Research from 1985-2003 as a Member of Technical Staff and a Department Head, creating the Human-Computer Interface Research Department in 1994. She served as editor-in-chief of Computational Linguistics from 1993-2003 and co-editor-in-chief of Speech Communication from 2003-2006. She served on the Executive Board of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) from 1993-2003, on the Permanent Council of International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) since 1996, and on the board of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) from 1999-2007 (as President 2005-2007); she has served on the CRA Executive Board (2013-14). She now serves on the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Council, the Executive Board of the North American ACL, and the board of the CRA-W. She has been an AAAI fellow since 1994, an ISCA Fellow since 2008, and a (founding) ACL Fellow since 2011, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2014. She is a winner of the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award (2011) and the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement (2011).