Machine Processing of Dialogue States; Speculations on Conversational Entropy

摘要

This keynote talk presents some ideas about 'conversational' speaking machines, illustrated with examples from the Herme dialogues. Herme was a small device that initiated conversations with passers-by in the Science Gallery at Trinity College in Dublin and managed to engage the majority in short conversations lasting approximately three minutes. No speech recognition was employed. Experience from that data collection and analyses of human-human conversational interactions has led us to consider a theory of Conversational Entropy wherein tight couplings become looser through time as topics decay and are refreshed by speaker changes and conversational restarts. Laughter is a particular cue to this decay mechanism and might prove to be sufficient information for machines to intrude into human conversations without causing offence.