Analysis of head movements and its role in spoken dialogue

The authors analyzed the relationship between semantics of utterances and movements of the head in a natural dialogue and a task oriented dialogue in Japanese. They show that visual information such as head movement will be useful for managing a dialogue and reducing the vagueness of semantics. First they extract the head movements calculated automatically in a natural conversation and indicate the role of this. After this they present an analysis of head movements during a cooperative problem solving task to construct a natural dialogue system in which the initiative of the conversation moves. They show the effectiveness of using visual information in a multimodal dialogue system.