Investigating the Effects of Dialogue Summarization on Intervention in Human-System Collaborative Dialogue

Dialogue systems are widely utilized in chatbots and call centers. However, it is often difficult for such systems to deliver fully autonomous dialogue. For users to have a better dialogue experience, a framework for human-system collaborative dialogue is proposed in which a human operator takes over the dialogue when needed, engaging in conversation with the user instead of the system (we call this process intervention). Operators join the dialogue in the middle; therefore, it is believed that dialogue summarization can be helpful for interventions. However, it is currently unclear whether dialogue summarization is actually useful. Therefore, in this study, we aim to investigate the usefulness of dialogue summaries for interventions through a field experiment conducted at an actual facility combining an aquarium and a zoo. The results of the field experiment revealed that dialogue summaries were more useful for intervention than dialogue history. Furthermore, we found no differences in the word categories included in the operator utterances during interventions irrespective of whether the dialogue history or dialogue format summary was presented to the operators, suggesting that dialogue format summary has content similar to that of dialogue history but improves the usefulness in intervention.