Evaluating a city exploration dialogue system combining question-answering and pedestrian navigation

Citation

Janarthanam S, Lemon O, Bartie P, Dalmas T, Dickinson A, Liu X, Mackaness W & Webber B (2013) Evaluating a city exploration dialogue system combining question-answering and pedestrian navigation. In: Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 1. ACL 2013: 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sofia, Bulgaria, 04.08.2013-09.08.2013. Stroudsburg, PA, USA: The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp. 1660-1668. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P13/P13-1000.pdf

Abstract
We present a city navigation and tourist information mobile dialogue app with integrated question-answering (QA) and geographic information system (GIS) modules that helps pedestrian users to navigate in and learn about urban environments. In contrast to existing mobile apps which treat these problems independently, our Android app addresses the problem of navigation and touristic question-answering in an integrated fashion using a shared dialogue context. We evaluated our system in comparison with Samsung S-Voice (which interfaces to Google navigation and Google search) with 17 users and found that users judged our system to be significantly more interesting to interact with and learn from. They also rated our system above Google search (with the Samsung S-Voice interface) for tourist information tasks.

• ACL-13-2.pdf