Implications for Generating Clarification Requests in Task-Oriented Dialogues

Clarification requests (CRs) in conversation ensure and maintain mutual understanding and thus play a crucial role in robust dialogue interaction. In this paper, we describe a corpus study of CRs in task-oriented dialogue and compare our findings to those reported in two prior studies. We find that CR behavior in task-oriented dialogue differs significantly from that in everyday conversation in a number of ways. Moreover, the dialogue type, the modality and the channel quality all influence the decision of when to clarify and at which level of the grounding process. Finally we identify form-function correlations which can inform the generation of CRs.