The Higgins Clarification experiments are a series of experiments designed to investigate the use clarification in dialogue. The first experiments investigate one-word clarification requests and the role of prosody in such requests.
Higgins Clarification 1
The first experiment consists of a perception tests where users were asked to interpret, or paraphrase, different synthesised realisations of the word "röd", "blå", and "gul" in Swedish. The possible interpretations were intended to map towards the first three levels of grounding, as described by e.g. Clark and Allwood.
The experiment was based on a brief, two utterance dialogue context, as in
| User | Till höger om mig ser jag en röd byggnad [To my right I see a red building] |
| System | Röd [Red] |
The prosody of the one syllable system utterance was varied systematically with regards to pitch peak height, position, and length. The subjects were asked to interpret the system utterance in terms of one of the following paraphrases:
| System | (1) OK, gul OK, yellow |
| System | (3) Sa du gul? Did you say yellow? |
| System | (2) Menar du verkligen gul? Do you really mean yellow? |
These paraphrases roughly correspond to the grounding levels discussed by e.g. Clark and Allwood, and constitute acceptance, clarification of perception and clarification of understanding, respectively.
The results show that three stimuli corresponded to the three different paraphrases to a significant degree. The mapping we found is described by the number in the paraphrases above and in the figure below, which illustrates the prosodic parameters of the stimuli. Click on the loudspeakers to listen to them.
Copyright © 2002-2004 Jens Edlund, Gabriel Skantze and the members of the Center for Speech Technology
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