Evaluating a Spoken Argumentative Dialogue System

Annalena Aicher, Stefan Hillmann, Thilo Michael, Sebastian Möller, Wolfgang Minker, Stefan Ultes

Abstract: A natural way for humans to build an opinion on a topic is through the gathering and exchange of new arguments. Speech interfaces for argumentative dialogue systems (ADS) are rather scarce and quite complex. To provide a more natural and intuitive interface, we include an adaption of a recently introduced natural language understanding (NLU) framework tailored to argumentative tasks into a complete end-to-end ADS. Within this paper we investigate the influence of two different input/output modalities (speech/speech and drop-down menu/text) and discuss issues and problems we encountered in a user study with 202 participants using our ADS.