Rhys Jacka

Project Title

Perspective taking in multiparty human-machine dialogue

Supervision Team

Benjamin R. Cowan, UCD / Vincent Wade, TCD

Description

Work on human-machine dialogue suggests that people take their partner’s perspective into account when interacting with speech based automated dialogue partners. Perspective taking more generally is seen as critical to successful communication. Through smartspeakers, speech agents have become devices that hold conversations with multiple users in interaction. This move from dyadic to multiparty dialogue is likely to be accelerated as agents take a more proactive approach to engaging users in dialogue, becoming member of a team rather than the sole target of the interaction. This PhD aims to identify how perspective taking mechanisms manifest in mixed human-speech agent teams, and how this influences user language choices when engaging with the speech agent.