Intrinsic and Extrinsic Evaluation of an Automatic User Disengagement Detector for an Uncertainty-Adaptive Spoken Dialogue System

Kate Forbes-Riley1,  Diane Litman1,  Heather Friedberg1,  Joanna Drummond2
1U. Pittsburgh, 2U. Toronto


Abstract

We present a model for detecting user disengagement during spoken dialogue interactions. Intrinsic evaluation of our model yields results on par with prior work. However, since our goal is immediate implementation in a system that already detects and adapts to user uncertainty, we go further than prior work and present an extrinsic evaluation of our model. Correlation analyses show crucially that our automatic disengagement labels correlate with system performance in the same way as the gold standard (manual) labels, while regression analyses show that detecting user disengagement adds value over and above detecting only user uncertainty when modeling performance. Our results suggest that automatically detecting and adapting to user disengagement has the potential to significantly improve performance even in the presence of noise, when compared with only adapting to one affective state or ignoring affect entirely.