# Dialogue Systems Can Generate Appropriate Responses without the Use of Question Marks? -- Investigation of the Effects of Question Marks on Dialogue Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03293 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03293/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Empirical Analysis of Training Strategies of Transformer-based Japanese Chit-chat Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05217/) (2021)
- [Improving Vietnamese Named Entity Recognition from Speech Using Word Capitalization and Punctuation Recovery Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00198/) (2020)
- [End-to-end Speech-to-Punctuated-Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03169/) (2022)
- [Overview of Dialogue Robot Competition 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12863/) (2022)
- [Unified Multimodal Punctuation Restoration Framework for Mixed-Modality Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00468/) (2022)
- [FaceChat: An Emotion-Aware Face-to-face Dialogue Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07316/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When individuals engage in spoken discourse, various phenomena can be observed that differ from those that are apparent in text-based conversation. While written communication commonly uses a question mark to denote a query, in spoken discourse, queries are frequently indicated by a rising intonation at the end of a sentence. However, numerous speech recognition engines do not append a question mark to recognized queries, presenting a challenge when creating a spoken dialogue system. Specifically, the absence of a question mark at the end of a sentence can impede the generation of appropriate responses to queries in spoken dialogue systems. Hence, we investigate the impact of question marks on dialogue systems, with the results showing that they have a significant impact. Moreover, we analyze specific examples in an effort to determine which types of utterances have the impact on dialogue systems.