CAN-Asia 2024

Spencer was on hand at the CAN-Asia Conference in Nagoya, Japan, 18-19 May 2024 to talk about our work with Ufonia.

We presented some of our research on how second language speakers behave when facing difficulties understanding a conversational user interface, or being understood by the system.

We show here how L2 speakers try to prompt the system to adapt the recipient design of its speech output to meet the needs of the user. But this is not easily recognised by the system, leading to further trouble where the system try to understand what the speaker is doing in these instances.

Also, systems are often limited in being able to modify speech output to meet the language competence levels of the users.

Finally, we show how L2 speakers will produce more elaborate turns-at-talk in response to a system indicating that there is a problem understanding the user. This is different from how L1 speakers design their responses to the system indicating a problem with understanding. In these cases, they simplify their responses, stripping out any talk that might be causing the system trouble.

The paper can be found in the conference proceedings at https://tim792.wixsite.com/can-asia/proceedings-2024