Symptoms of cognitive load in interactions with a dialogue system

Humans adapt their behaviour to the perceived cognitive load of their dialogue partner, for example, delaying non-essential information. We propose that spoken dialogue systems should do the same, particularly in high-stakes scenarios, such as emergency response. In this paper, we provide a summary of the prosodic, turn-taking and other linguistic symptoms of cognitive load analysed in the literature. We then apply these features to a single corpus in the restaurant-finding domain and propose new symptoms that are evidenced through interaction with the dialogue system, including utterance entropy, speech recognition confidence, as well as others based on dialogue acts.