Linguistic Design of In-Vehicle Prompts in Adaptive Dialog Systems: An Analysis of Potential Factors Involved in the Perception of Naturalness

Abstract

Against the background of current trends towards natural and adaptive in-vehicle Spoken Dialog Systems, this paper aims at evaluating potential factors involved in the perception of naturalness and comprehensibility of system prompts. By conducting an exploratory user study investigating various syntactic paraphrases, we were able to identify several system- and user-sided characteristics which should be considered in the design of system prompts. We conclude from our results that the choice of a syntactic structure for in-vehicle prompts is a relevant question and interestingly depends on several individual user characteristics, such as personality.