What's in a gaze?: the role of eye-gaze in reference resolution in multimodal conversational interfaces

  • Authors:
  • Zahar Prasov;Joyce Y. Chai

  • Affiliations:
  • Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI;Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Multimodal conversational interfaces allow users to carry a dialog with a graphical display using speech to accomplish a particular task. Motivated by previous psycholinguistic findings, we examine how eye-gaze contributes to reference resolution in such a setting. Specifically, we present an integrated probabilistic framework that combines speech and eye-gaze for reference resolution. We further examine the relationship between eye-gaze and increased domain modeling with corresponding linguistic processing. Our empirical results show that the incorporation of eye-gaze significantly improves reference resolution performance. This improvement is most dramatic when a simple domain model is used. Our results also show that minimal domain modeling combined with eye-gaze significantly outperforms complex domain modeling without eye-gaze, which indicates that eye-gaze can be used to potentially compensate a lack of domain modeling for reference resolution.