Context restoration in multi-tasking dialogue

In this paper we conduct an exploratory experiment on context restoration in multi-tasking dialogue and report our preliminary findings. We examine a corpus of human-human dialogues, in which pairs of conversants, using speech, work on an ongoing task while occasionally completing real-time tasks. We investigate whether the conversants, when returning to the ongoing task, make any effort to restore the context. First, we identify two types of actions, utterance restatement and information review, as possible restorations. Second, from a statistical analysis, we find that these actions are used more often when returning to the ongoing task, and hence seem to play a role in context restoration. Our findings will help to build a foundation for future speech interfaces that support multi-tasking dialogue.