An Evaluation of Spoken and Textual Interaction in the RITEL Interactive Question Answering System
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008)
Abstract
The RITEL project aims to integrate a spoken language dialogue system and an open-domain information retrieval system in order to enable human users to ask a general question and to refine their search for information interactively. This type of system is often referred to as an Interactive Question Answering (IQA) system. In this paper, we present an evaluation of how the performance of the RITEL system differs when users interact with it using spoken versus textual input and output. Our results indicate that while users do not perceive the two versions to perform significantly differently, many more questions are asked in a typical text-based dialogue.