Identifying Statements Crucial for Awareness of Interpretive Nonsense to Prevent Communication Breakdowns (2023)

Abstract: During remote conversations, communication breakdowns often occur when a listener misses certain statements. Our objective is to prevent such breakdowns by identifying Statements Crucial for Awareness of Interpretive Nonsense (SCAINs). If a listener misses a SCAIN, s/he may interpret subsequent statements differently from the speaker’s intended meaning. To identify SCAINs, we adopt a unique approach where we create a dialogue by omitting two consecutive statements from the original dialogue and then generate text to make the following statement more specific. The novelty of the proposed method lies in simulating missing information by processing text with omissions. We validate the effectiveness of SCAINs through evaluation using a dialogue dataset. Furthermore, we demonstrate that SCAINs cannot be identified as merely important statements, highlighting the uniqueness of our proposed method.

## introduction communication breakdowns are sometimes caused by listeners missing speaker's statements in conversations. listeners tend to miss statements when they are absent-minded or lost in thought. in online conversations, there are other obstacles such as network failures and background noise, which may cause more statements to be missed than in face-to-face conversations. problems associated with listeners missing statements are not just the information in the missing statements not being conveyed. the listener's interpretation of other statements may also change because they missed previous statements. online conversations can be supported by existing techniques, such as dialogue summarization @xcite and discourse structure visualization @xcite . however, previous studies have not considered the change in the interpretation caused by missing statements. speakers need to be aware that the listener's interpretation may tough job, isn't it? 5 a: exactly. working at an advertising agency must be hard too. by the way, i live in a one-story house in hokkaido. 6 b: you live in hokkaido? i envy you because that's a place with good food. i'm from aomori and i like mountainous areas, so i live near the mountains. 9 a: because i was born in the countryside, it's a very attractive place. we assume that scains will be used to develop a conversation support system that is implemented on online meeting tools. figure 1 shows a diagram of the assumed system. speech from the speakers is sent to the online meeting server. the transcript of the speech is fed into the scain extractor. the scain is reported to the speakers in the online meeting application so that the speakers are aware of possible interpretations that differ from their intended meaning. the scain extractor computes the change in interpretation by a listener who missed hearing certain statements. in this sense, scains are different from locally ambiguous statements. even if a statement is locally ambiguous, the statement is not a scain unless the interpretation changes due to mishearing. the scain extractor picks up the statements when mishearing may change the interpretation of the subsequent statement, but the listener is not aware of the change, so the conversation support system will alert the speakers to pay attention to the different interpretations. ## discussion the validity of the scains was confirmed in that when the scains were omitted, the intent 12557 of the subsequent statements became unclear and the meaning of the subsequent statements changed. on the other hand, the statements became sudden when the preceding statements were omitted, regardless of whether the preceding statements were the scains or not. the statements may have been perceived as sudden because they were inconsistent with previous statements, not just because the intent of the statement was unclear. in contrast, the intent of the statements became clearer and the statements became less sudden when the scains were provided before the statements. there may have been a context effect caused by the order in which the dialogues were presented. in the scain condition, the raters may have found the complete dialogues relatively clearer and less sudden after rating the omitted dialogues, which were less clear. if the llm is informed that some statements have been omitted, it can generate a possible interpretation of the core statement by predicting the content of the omitted statements. however, the generated interpretation is likely to be different from the intended meaning because crucial information for interpreting the core statement has been lost. the uniqueness of the scains was confirmed by the fact that the scains were identified regardless of the importance of the statements and topic shifts. we found different characteristics for the scains and for the important statements through qualitative analysis. particularly, the scains had the following characteristics: on the other hand, the important statements had the following characteristics: note that jpersonachat consisted of dialogues in which the speakers tried to get to know each other, so most statements contained some kind of information about the speaker's personal attributes. therefore, it may have been difficult to select only two important statements from a dialogue. we speculate that there is no significant relationship between the scains and topic shifts because the topic shifts do not necessarily change the interpretation of the subsequent statement. even if there is a topic shift, the listener may correctly interpret a statement that contains sufficient information about the new topic. the scain extraction architecture can be applied to a conversation support system. the system will inform the sender of scains which statements are scains during conversations. the sender will pay close attention to verbal and nonverbal responses from the listener. the sender will be able to identify the communication breakdowns earlier and recover from the breakdowns by supplementing the scains with more information. if the speakers do not use the system, the sender will not care if his/her intent is conveyed to the listener and will continue with a one-way conversation. the system will prevent such situations and let the speakers be aware of communication breakdowns. ## conclusion in this paper, we proposed the concept of statements crucial for awareness of interpretive nonsense (scain) and a method for extracting scains from a dialogue. we confirmed the validity of scains with the results showing that clarity in the omitted dialogue was significantly lower in the scain condition and that difference was significantly higher in the scain condition. we also confirmed the uniqueness of the scains with the results showing that there was no significant dependence between the classification based on scains and the classification based on importance. in future work, we will develop a conversation support system using scains and evaluate the effectiveness of the system with an experiment in a real environment.