<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="N04-1027">
  <Title>The Tao of CHI: Towards Effective Human-Computer Interaction</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Research on dialogue systems in the past has focused on engineering the various processing stages involved in dialogical human-computer interaction (HCI) - e. g., robust automatic speech recognition, intention recognition, natural language generation or speech synthesis (cf. Allen et al. (1996), Cox et al. (2000) or Bailly et al. (2003)). Alongside these efforts the characteristics of computer-directed language have also been examined as a general phenomenon (cf. Zoeppritz (1985), Wooffitt et al. (1997) or Darves and Oviatt (2002)). The flip side, i. e., computer-human interaction (CHI), has received very little attention as a research question by itself. That is not to say that natural language generation and synthesis have not made vast improvements, but rather that the nature and design of the computer as an interlocutor itself, i. e., the effects of human-directed language, have not been scrutinized as such.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Looking at broad levels of distinctions for dialogue systems, e. g., that of Allen et al. (2001) between controlled and conversational dialogue systems, we note the singular employment of human-based differentiae, i. e., the degree of the restriction of the human interactions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Differentiae stemming from the other communication partner, i. e., the computer, are not taken into account neither on a practical nor on a theoretical level.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In the past controlled and restricted interactions between the user and the system increased recognition and understanding accuracies to a level that systems became reliable enough for deployment in various real world applications, e. g., transportation or cinema information systems (Aust et al., 1995; Gorin et al., 1997; Gallwitz et al., 1998). Today's more conversational dialogue systems, e. g., SMARTKOM (Wahlster et al., 2001) or MATCH (Johnston et al., 2002), are able to cope with much less predictable user utterances. Despite the fact that in these systems recognition and processing have become extremely difficult, the reliability thereof has been pushed towards acceptable degrees by employing an array of highly sophisticated technological advances - such as dynamic lexica for multi-domain speech recognition and flexible pronunciation models (Rapp et al., 2000), robust understanding and discourse modeling techniques (Johnston, 1998; Engel, 2002; Alexandersson and Becker, 2001) combined with ontological reasoning capabilities (Gurevych et al., 2003; Porzel et al., 2003).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> However, the usability of such conversational dialogue systems is still unsatisfactory, as shown in usability experiments with real users (Beringer, 2003) that employed the PROMISE evaluation framework described in Beringer et al. (2002), which offers some multimodal extentions over the PARADISE framework described in Walker et al. (2000) . The work described herein constitutes a starting point for a scientific examination of the whys and wherefores of the challenging results stemming from such end-to-end evaluations of conversational dialogue systems. Following a brief description of the state of the art in examinations of computer-directed language, we describe a new experimental paradigm, the first two studies using the paradigm and their corresponding results. Concluding, we discuss the ensuing implications for the design of successful and felicitous conversational dialogue systems.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>