Managing Weaknesses

• Participants: Arne, Kerstin, Kilian, Konstantina, Nina, Srini
• Notes taken by Kerstin

We found that it is crucial for the system to communicate what it can and cannot do – in contrast to the general procedure: implement X and hope that X is what users expect and want and all understand in the same way and never demand Y.

This necessitates that

• the system is self-aware:
  • it needs to be as specific as possible on what it understood and what it didn’t understand
  • it needs to know when it is getting something wrong in order to issue appropriate behaviors
    • people don’t like to be criticized or ordered around -> apologize for mistakes and shortcomings
    • people do like tips and opportunities, especially if it is presented as insider information
  • it could boast about and overdo those aspects that it is particularly good at in order to signal implicitly its strengths (also possible: reformulation to one’s own advantage)
• the system accounts for people’s expectations
• the system sets correct expectations by choosing linguistic structures itself that it can also understand (tight I/O coupling) but also more generally that reflect its competence
  • for instance, using one syntactic construction may prompt users into using syntactic structures of similar complexity
• the system knows the preconditions and basis of its own behaviors
  • in order to allow clarification questions concerning presupposed, basic information

We also discussed that people seem to prefer agents as the anchors for dialog systems

• they may also evaluate the system better if there is an agent present
• they may also recall information better

people’s judgment/evaluation of a system always takes place against their expectations

Edit this page =--= TimoBaumann -- 06 Oct 2012