An Empirical Study of Speech Recognition Errors in Human-Computer Dialogue

Abstract

The development of spoken dialogue systems is soon faced with the limitations of current speech recognition technology that make recognition errors a recurring problem for any dialogue system. Several studies have suggested that there is no clear correlation between speech recognition scores and user satisfaction, or the ability to complete the tasks underlying spoken dialogue [Yankelovich et al., 1995] [Dybkjaer et al., 1997], suggesting that a certain level of errors should not prevent spoken dialogue systems from being successful. However, most of the studies on speech recognition errors have concentrated either on parsing incomplete utterances or on global dialogue robustness, i.e. at task completion level [Allen et al., 1996] [Stromback and Jonsson, 1998] [Brandt-Pook et al., 1996]. There have been very few studies exploring the impact of speech recognition errors across the various component of a dialogue system, or specifically evaluating the impact of speech recognition errors on the overall dialogue behaviour.