Speaking without knowing what to say... or when to end

Humans produce speech incrementally and on-line as the dialogue progresses using information from several different sources in parallel. A dialogue system that generates output in a stepwise manner and not in preplanned syntactically correct sentences needs to signal how new dialogue contributions relate to previous discourse. This paper describes a data collection which is the foundation for an effort towards more human-like language generation in DEAL, a spoken dialogue system developed at KTH. Two annotators labelled cue phrases in the corpus with high inter-annotator agreement (kappa coefficient 0.82).