@misc{TsaiBaumannPecuneetal., author = {Tsai, Vivian and Baumann, Timo and Pecune, Florian and Cassell, Justine}, title = {Faster Responses are Better Responses: Introducing Incrementality into Sociable Virtual Personal Assistants}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{TsaiBaumannPecuneetal., author = {Tsai, Vivian and Baumann, Timo and Pecune, Florian and Cassell, Justine}, title = {Faster Responses Are Better Responses: Introducing Incrementality into Sociable Virtual Personal Assistants}, series = {9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology}, volume = {579}, booktitle = {9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology}, editor = {D'Haro, Luis Fernando and Banchs, Rafael E. and Li, Haizhou}, publisher = {Springer Singapore}, address = {Singapore}, isbn = {978-981-13-9442-3}, issn = {1876-1119}, doi = {10.1007/978-981-13-9443-0_10}, pages = {111 -- 118}, abstract = {Speech-based interactive systems, such as virtual personal assistants, inevitably use complex architectures, with a multitude of modules working in series (or less often in parallel) to perform a task (e.g., giving personalized movie recommendations via dialog). Add modules for evoking and sustaining sociability with the user and the accumulation of processing latencies through the modules results in considerable turn-taking delays. We introduce incremental speech processing into the generation pipeline of the system to overcome this challenge with only minimal changes to the system architecture, through partial underspecification that is resolved as necessary. A user study with a sociable movie recommendation agent objectively diminishes turn-taking delays; furthermore, users not only rate the incremental system as more responsive, but also rate its recommendation performance as higher.}, language = {en} }