The Potsdam Dialogue Lab

We've recently begun to do experimental work on dialogue, mostly within the DEAWU project, but also in classes we teach. This page briefly introduces our experiments, but mostly lists some tools (both third-party as well as own-developments) and equipment we use, and resources we've built (or are building).

Experiments

At a stretch, one might call the approach we're following in our current series of experiments a Rutherfordian approach: we take a dialogue situation and smash it against a wall, in the hope to learn from the resulting smithereens what the parts are of that thing called dialogue.

OK, that's not a great description, but we hope you get the idea: We systematically disturb a conversational setting (for example by introducing turn-taking restrictions or channel problems), in order to learn from the strategies that the dialogue participants use to deal with these disturbances. Watch this space for a list of publications about the experiments.

Tools for experimental dialogue research

Recommended Third-Party Tools

Well, these tools hardly need our endorsement, but for completeness, here's what we use to get from recording to analysis:
  • To help with the transcription of recordings, and for acoustic analysis, we use Praat, the premiere computational phonetics tool from the University of Amsterdam. (Here's a page with useful scripts to automatise some frequent tasks in Praat, courtesy of Mietta Lennes of the University of Helsinki.)

  • For further annotations on the transcriptions (dialogue acts, sentence types, co-reference, etc.), we use MMAX, an annotation editor built by EML research Heidelberg. We use it because it allows for easy definition of annotation schemata, flexible definition of visualisation styles, and is based consistently on stand-off markup.

  • For the annotation of video material we use Anvil (built by M. Kipp from DFKI, Saarbrücken) which integrates quite nicely into this toolchain, as it can import TextGrids from Praat.

Tools developed at Potsdam

The tools described above are great, but for some specialised (support) tasks, we had to build some tools of our own, which we are offering to the community here in the hope that they may be useful to others as well.
  • ZeitWort is a tool for displaying all kinds of interval-based textual information. This could be (transcriptions or annotations of) utterances in a dialogue, which is what we use it for, but it could also be events occuring during the execution of a program. Whatever, as long as it has a start and end time, we'll display it.
    A very useful feature is the "fit to page" mode which lets you view whole dialogues at a glance: great to get a quick feel for the structure of a dialogue. Zeitwort's display of interval-based data is fully configurable; e.g., you can realise a display where turns are shown as bars, with dialogue act annotations encoded by different background colours. (ZeitWort's main developer is Micha Brandt.)


    This is an example where 5 kinds of information (speaker A transcription and dialogue act annotation, same for speaker B, plus move annotation) are layed out in one timeline.


    This is an example of the overview mode, showing an excerpt of a dialogue.

    Zeitwort can be downloaded from its sourceforge page. If you try it out, please let us know how you like it!

  • Less a proper tool, more a collection of helpers: praat2mmax. Contains a) a script that converts Praat TextGrids (e.g., transcriptions of dialogues) into b) our default MMAX2-project style for dialogues, which can form the basis for all kinds of dialogue annotations.

  • Also not a tool per se, and not even directly related to experimental data collection, but I'll put it here anyways: The Parrot Sketch, or: How to turn your computer into a parrot using only freely available tools. Detailed instructions that explain how to install tools like Sphinx4 (automatic speech recognition), freeTTS (Text-to-Speech syntheziser) and Dipper (Java) (Dialogue Management framework), within the OAA (Open Agent Architecture), plus a few scripts that make this task easier. We use this set-up as a basis for teaching dialogue management in practical courses.
    The instructions can be read separately here, the full package is available here.


Equipment in the dialogue lab

  • We've built a little hardware box that realises a full-duplex communication channel (basically, it connects two headsets, and also offers a couple of buttons and signal lights) that is fully computer-controllable (using the LabJack U12 USB breakout box). With this we can realise reaction-time experiments, things like "push-to-talk" turn-taking policies, etc.

  • We also have available some digital video cameras for recording participants in our experiments.


Resources built

As part of the DEAWU project we are running a series of experiments where the same communcation situation is systematically distorted in a variety of ways. The setting is described in detail in [tba]. We make the collected corpora available here. A computer programme for supporting the setting will be available here soon as well.
  • The first kind of "distortion" was the introduction of a "push-to-talk" turn-taking regime. Here we wanted to investigate the effect of such restrictions on the structure of the resulting dialogue. This work was mostly done by our student Tatjana Lucht, as part of her diploma thesis.


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[last changed - 04/08/2006]