Grounding of names in directory enquiries dialogue. A corpus study of listener feedback behaviour

Abstract

This paper presents a new corpus of dialogues in the domain of directory enquiries. We describe its collection and annotation process and then analyse feedback strategies employed by the dialogue participants focusing mainly on the grounding instances in the context of transmission of names. We discuss our findings in regards to their implementation in dialogue systems as well as in comparison to previous corpus studies of feedback. Finally, we present a preliminary formalisation of the grounding process of names, using a finite-state approach to modelling grounding in dialogue proposed by Traum (1994).