Abstract
This paper proposes a new dialogue control method which can handle a huge number of words. When a conventional interface whose target words are not hierarchically classified fails to recognize a spoken word, the system asks the user to speak it again. This reutterance cycle is repeated until the correct word is recognized. If this repeated cycle continues, the user feels irritated and finally abandons the dialogue. Our proposed dialogue control method asks the attributes of words to narrow down the candidates when the recognition fails. We define the effectiveness of attributes based on the difficulty of recognition and the decrease rate of lexical entropy. We adopt three attributes against the domain of sir names: the number of characters, the initial, and the phonemes of the initial Kanji character. We have implemented an interface system of 87, 944 sir name recognition and confirmed that our method evades the irritating reutterance cycles and provides as little stressful dialogues as by human operators.
