Empirical Study: Comparing Hasselt with C# to Describe Multimodal Dialogs

Abstract

Previous research has proposed guidelines for creating domain-specific languages for modeling human-machine multimodal dialogs. One of these guidelines suggests the use of multiple levels of abstraction so that the descriptions of multimodal events can be separated from the human-machine dialog model. In line with this guideline, we implemented Hasselt, a domain-specific language that combines textual and visual models, each of them aiming at describing different aspects of the intended dialog system. We conducted a user study to measure whether the proposed language provides benefits over equivalent event-callback code. During the user study participants had to modify the Hasselt models and the equivalent C# code. The completion times obtained for C# were on average shorter, although the difference was not statiscally significant. Subjective responses were collected using standardized questionnaires and an interview, which both indicated that participants saw value in the proposed models. We provide possible explanations for the results and discuss some lessons learned regarding the design of the empirical study. Index Terms—Multimodal systems, Human-machine dialog, Finite state machines, Dialog model, Domain-specific language.