Dialogue Systems Can Generate Appropriate Responses without the Use of Question Marks? -- Investigation of the Effects of Question Marks on Dialogue Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the absence of question marks in spoken dialogue systems affects their ability to generate appropriate responses, highlighting the importance of intonation cues over punctuation in speech recognition.

Contribution

It demonstrates that question marks significantly influence dialogue system responses and analyzes utterance types to understand this effect better.

Findings

Question marks impact dialogue response accuracy

Intonation cues can substitute punctuation in speech

Certain utterance types are more affected by punctuation absence

Abstract

When individuals engage in spoken discourse, various phenomena can be observed that differ from those that are apparent in text-based conversation. While written communication commonly uses a question mark to denote a query, in spoken discourse, queries are frequently indicated by a rising intonation at the end of a sentence. However, numerous speech recognition engines do not append a question mark to recognized queries, presenting a challenge when creating a spoken dialogue system. Specifically, the absence of a question mark at the end of a sentence can impede the generation of appropriate responses to queries in spoken dialogue systems. Hence, we investigate the impact of question marks on dialogue systems, with the results showing that they have a significant impact. Moreover, we analyze specific examples in an effort to determine which types of utterances have the impact on dialogue systems.