Guiding Oral Conversations: How to Nudge Users Towards Asking Questions?

Marcel Gohsen, Johannes Kiesel, Mariam Korashi, Jan Ehlers, Benno Stein

Abstract: How could an envisioned voice-based conversational information system assist the information seeker when the seeker does not know how to continue the conversation? The system could explicitly suggest a question to ask after each of its responses, but this approach quickly feels restrictive, repetitive, and interrupts immersion in the conversation. In this paper, we explore, for the first time, unobtrusive syntactic and auditive modifications of oral system responses to nudge information seekers towards asking about specific topics. We report the results of a crowdsourcing study with 965 participations that investigated the effectiveness and drawbacks of different modifications in three information scenarios.