Publication
"i like your shirt" - Dialogue Acts for Enabling Social Talk in Conversational Agents
Tina Klüwer
In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), 11th, September 17-19, Reykjavik, Iceland, Springer, 2011.
Abstract
This paper presents a set of dialogue acts which can be used to implement small talk conversations in conversational agents. Although many conversational agents are supposed to engage in small talk, no systematic development of social dialogue acts and sequences for dialogue systems was made so far. Instead systems reuse the same conversation sequence every time they engage in small talk or integrate stateless chatbots without any knowledge about the ongoing conversation. The small talk dialogue act taxonomy resented in this paper consists of functionally motivated acts inspired by the social science work of "face". Moreover, a corpus annotation and possible dialogue act sequences extracted from this annotated corpus are described. The dialogue act set and the sequences are used in our dialogue system to provide a more knowledgedriven treatment of small talk than chatbots can offer.