Partial correction beats repeating the whole utterance

What it is

In an address, only “Zhongshan Road” was heard as “Qingshan Road”; number and city are right. Forcing the user to say the whole sentence again puts the already-correct slots back through the recogniser, and a new substitution may change the number. Partial correction over full repeat is an error-re-injection ledger: expose only the broken constituent; do not gamble another acoustic draw on what is already right. It answers how much the user should have to say in a repair: being allowed to change one item is the precondition; how short the mouth should open is this layer’s ledger.

Why it happens

Each opening of the mouth is an independent recognition event. Joint error of a full restatement rises with slot count: three slots spoken again, even if each is fairly accurate, already give a non-trivial chance that at least one is hit by a new error. Partial correction shrinks the joint to one slot; the others stay frozen and sit out this acoustic lottery. People restating a long sentence also self-repair, merge, and drop a piece that was just correct — not from forgetting, from the planning cost of a whole utterance squeezing confirmed detail out of working memory. A system that only accepts a full pattern (city and number required again) blocks partial correction at the grammar, and people can only send the whole line. Freeze is not ignore: frozen slots should still appear in the next short echo, so the user sees they were not moved by this opening.

Studying it

On the same address or flight task, compare two repairs: speak only the broken span versus full restatement. Inject an error on one slot; the others are already correct before the inject. Dependents: how often an innocent slot is rewritten by a new error after repair, how often the target slot is fixed, user-turn length. Independents: number of already-correct slots, how open the target vocabulary is (street names versus closed morning/afternoon).

In logs, split repair turns by whether they repeated words of already-correct slots. If the repeat group shows more innocent-slot drift, re-injection is in the field. Lab scripts that forbid partial syntax make full restatement the only observable path and fake the conclusion that “users just like to repeat.”

Where it stops holding

When the only error is that the whole utterance drifted and a partial span has no residue to align to (a heavily accented smear), partial correction has no anchor; a full line or a channel change is cleaner. If the user spontaneously restates everything, still align by slot: freeze matches that remain high-confidence, update only the span that does not match — do not overwrite the lot because they said more. Safety-sensitive spellings (account names) sometimes must be recaptured as a whole; local splice leaves a seam. Reading “partial beats full” as a ban on repairing two slots in one go injures “time and party size are both wrong” — two slots together is still partial, relative to reading the whole ticket including the items that were right.

Applying it

• On a repair turn, accept a short line that contains only the new value; align to the target slot by type and contrast. Do not reject for missing the other slot names.
• After alignment, freeze grounded slots that were not mentioned. Even if their old values reappear in the same utterance, do not overwrite with new recognition unless the new value clearly conflicts.
• Short echo: the changed item plus one or two frozen items. Do not re-read the whole ticket as “please confirm and say it again.”
• How to check: three-slot address, only the road wrong. Half the people fix only the road, half restate the sentence. If the full-repeat group rewrites the number and the partial group does not, stop making full restatement the default repair path.

Related

• Same group: M1.06.1 Users must be able to correct the part that was misunderstood · M1.06.3 Consecutive failures must change strategy, not repeat the same prompt
• Nearby: M2.04 Error-Recovery Wording · C7.13 Voice Editing and Spoken Correction · M2.08 Explicit and Implicit Confirmation
• Search terms: partial correction over full repeat · error re-injection · slot freeze