This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award to investigate how to exploit disfluencies in spoken language dialog systems and also how to enhance the ability of computerized dialog systems to handle disfluencies. In the first task the decision of what parts of the diffluent dialog should be edited or retained is studied as well as its influence in anticipating the speakers' planning problems. In the second task the investigation centers on the systems' ability to utilize multimodal feedback adapted from conversation to repair misinterpretations arising from disfluencies. Additionally, corpora is analyzed with the objective of establishing a dialogic evaluation metric for spoken language systems which incorporates the system's ability to recover from faults.
