A study of users' behaviors in different states of a spontaneous oral dialogue with an automatic inquiry system

The observation that most of the present automatic telephonic inquiry systems remain rigid and quite unattractive for an important part of the public raises the problem of adapting dialogue strategies to potential users. We have been observing users' utterances in 6 corpuses obtained from 5 experiments with different users groups calling our DEMON automatic telephonic inquiry system for train schedule information. We especially focused on users' answer to implicit and explicit confirmation questions, and users' first utterances. We show figures obtained and how these observations helped us to design new DEMON dialogue strategy.