Detecting, Repairing, and Preventing Human-Machine Miscommunication

This article summarizes a workshop entitled "Detecting, Repairing, and Preventing Human-Machine Miscommunication," held on 4 August 1996 in Portland, Oregon. The author presents the significant issues raised during the four specific workshop sessions. Research related to achieving robust interaction is an important subarea in AI. Early work concerned the correction of spelling or grammatical errors in a user's utterance so that the system could more easily match them against a fixed linguistic model; work has also been done in the area of speech recognition, attempting to find the best fit of a sound signal to legal sequences of linguistic objects. All these approaches have assumed that the system's model is always correct.