Simulation of Conversation Behavior in Case of Impaired Telephone Transmission

随着网络语音传输的出现，延迟和丢包等缺陷影响着对话者的会话行为。例如，端到端延迟会影响轮询，而丢包会降低传输消息的可理解性。因此，这两种类型的障碍都会引发后续请求、元沟通和闯入，并通过影响对话行为而降低感知质量。这是本研究项目的目的是描述两个对话者的谈话行为，他们通过一个受损的电话通道使用正式模型进行交流，并因此使其易于自动模拟。在人机交互中取得成功的基于议程的模型被转移到人与人之间的对话中，并增加了由于数据包丢失而导致的延迟传输和误解处理的轮流描述。使用会话测试的语言材料，在文本、语调、语义和语用层面进行模拟。在模拟过程中，根据传输信道延迟和丢包情况，根据这些信息生成新的会话。然后将模拟对话与经验观察到的对话进行比较，以便进行评估。从这些数据中导出了一个预测会话质量的模型。因此，仿真方法不仅有助于研究人类通信行为的基本方面，而且可用于通信网络的质量工程。

With the advent of speech transmission over the internet, impairments such as delay and packet loss affect the conversation behavior of the interlocutors. As an example, end-to-end delay affects turn-taking and packet loss degrades intelligibility of the transmitted messages. Thus, both types of impairments provoke follow-up requests, meta communication and barge-in, and degrade perceived quality by influencing conversation behavior.It is the aim of the present research project to describe the conversation behavior of two interlocutors who communicate via an impaired telephone channel using formal models, and hereby make it accessible to an automatic simulation. Agenda-based models which are successful in human-machine interaction are transferred to human-human dialogues and augmented with descriptions of turn-taking with delayed transmission and misunderstanding handling due to packet loss. The simulation is carried out on the levels of text, intonation, semantics and pragmatics using linguistic material from conversation tests. During the simulation, new conversations are generated based on this material dependent on the transmission channel delay and packet loss. Simulated dialogues are then compared to empirically-observed ones for evaluation purposes. A model for predicting conversation quality is derived from these data. The simulation approach is thus not only useful for research into basic aspects of human communication behavior, but can also be used for quality engineering of communication networks.