Human pause and resume behaviours for unobtrusive humanlike in-car spoken dialogue systems

This paper presents a first, largely qualitative analysis of a set of human-human dialogues recorded specifically to provide insights in how humans handle pauses and resumptions in situations where the speakers cannot see each other, but have to rely on the acoustic signal alone. The work presented is part of a larger effort to find unobtrusive human dialogue behaviours that can be mimicked and implemented in-car spoken dialogue systems within in the EU project Get Home Safe, a collaboration between KTH, DFKI, Nuance, IBM and Daimler aiming to find ways of driver interaction that minimizes safety issues,. The analysis reveals several human temporal, semantic/pragmatic, and structural behaviours that are good candidates for inclusion in spoken dialogue systems.