First Steps Toward Linking Dialogues: Mediating Between Free-text Questions and Pre-recorded Video Answers

Pre-recorded video segments can be very compelling for a variety of immersive training purposes, including providing answers to questions in after-action reviews. Answering questions fluently using pre-recorded video poses challenges, however. When humans interact, answers are constructed after questions are posed. When answers are pre-recorded, even if a correct answer exists in a library of video segments, the answer may be phrased in a way that is not coherent with the question. This paper reports on basic research experiments with short "linking dialogues" that mediate between the question and answer to reduce (or eliminate) the incoherence, resulting in more natural human-system interaction. A set of experiments were performed in which links were elicited to bridge between questions from users of an existing training application and selected answers from the system, and then comparisons made with unlinked answers. The results show that a linking dialogue can significantly increase the perceived relevance of the system's answers.