Natural versus Standardized Approaches to Spoken System Design

This book makes theoretical, methodological, and
empirical
contributions to the design of effective and usable
spoken
interfaces. Specifically it investigates design
implications of two
general approaches to system design - the natural
approach and the
standardized approach - as they relate to generation
of referring
expressions. Both discourse reference and the
generation of scalar
adjectives are explored. The method of this
exploration is adapted
from cognitive psychology, and it is called the
dual-task paradigm.
Participants follow instructions generated by either
a natural or a
standardized system, while doing another simple task
at the same
time. Performance on both tasks, across participants,
is used to
compare the cognitive load of the two systems. Both
the method
and the findings will be of interest to spoken system
developers and
researchers. The book also provides new findings
about the
obligatoriness (and lack thereof) of pragmatic
inference in human
language comprehension, which will be of interest to
psycholinguists, cognitive psychologists, and
cognitive scientists.

Autorentext

Ellen Campana bridges the fields of human-computer interactionand cognitive psychology, specifically dialogue systems and psycholinguistics.She holds a Joint Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Computer Science fromthe University of Rochester and is currently an Assistant Professor at ArizonaState University.

Klappentext

This book makes theoretical, methodological, andempirical contributions to the design of effective and usablespoken interfaces. Specifically it investigates designimplications of two general approaches to system design - the naturalapproach and the standardized approach - as they relate to generationof referring expressions. Both discourse reference and thegeneration of scalar adjectives are explored. The method of thisexploration is adapted from cognitive psychology, and it is called thedual-task paradigm. Participants follow instructions generated by eithera natural or a standardized system, while doing another simple taskat the same time. Performance on both tasks, across participants,is used to compare the cognitive load of the two systems. Boththe method and the findings will be of interest to spoken systemdevelopers and researchers. The book also provides new findingsabout the obligatoriness (and lack thereof) of pragmaticinference in human language comprehension, which will be of interest to psycholinguists, cognitive psychologists, andcognitive scientists.