Abstract

I will talk about work done within the DEAWU project (DEAling with Uncertainty; see http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/DEAWU ).

We are interested in learning more about the strategies human speakers use to deal with understanding problems and ensure (good enough) intersubjectivity; our mid-term goal being to use what we learn to devise strategies that spoken dialogue systems can use. In previous work (Schlangen 2004; Rodrigues & Schlangen 2004) we have provided a classification of different types of clarification requests (which has later been used in more applied research by (Rieser and Moore 2005)) and have conducted a corpus study. Our current work is a continuation of this. Instead of analysing a corpus of “normal” conversation, we are creating a communication situation in which one channel is disturbed by random bits of noise. In the analysis, we are interested both in the immediate reactions to the acoustic problems and in the more global strategies that speakers choose to limit the damage of the defective channel.