Follow-up question handling in the IMIX and Ritel systems: A comparative study

One of the basic topics of question answering (QA) dialogue systems is how follow-up questions should be interpreted by a QA system. In this paper, we shall discuss our experience with the IMIX and Ritel systems, for both of which a follow-up question handling scheme has been developed, and corpora have been collected. These two systems are each other's opposites in many respects: IMIX is multimodal, non-factoid, black-box QA, while Ritel is speech, factoid, keyword-based QA. Nevertheless, we will show that they are quite comparable, and that it is fruitful to examine the similarities and differences. We shall look at how the systems are composed, and how real, non-expert, users interact with the systems. We shall also provide comparisons with systems from the literature where possible, and indicate where open issues lie and in what areas existing systems may be improved. We conclude that most systems have a common architecture with a set of common subtasks, in particular detecting follow-up questions and finding referents for them. We characterise these tasks using the typical techniques used for performing them, and data from our corpora. We also identify a special type of follow-up question, the discourse question, which is asked when the user is trying to understand an answer, and propose some basic methods for handling it

Programming Language Techniques for Natural Language Applications

It is easy to imagine machines that can communicate in natural language. Constructing such machines is more difficult. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate how declarative grammar formalisms that distinguish between abstract and concrete syntax make it easier to develop natural language applications. We describe how the type-theorectical grammar formalism Grammatical Framework (GF) can be used as a high-level language for natural language applications. By taking advantage of techniques from the field of programming language implementation, we can use GF grammars to perform portable and efficient parsing and linearization, generate speech recognition language models, implement multimodal fusion and fission, generate support code for abstract syntax transformations, generate dialogue managers, and implement speech translators and web-based syntax-aware editors. By generating application components from a declarative grammar, we can reduce duplicated work, ensure consistency, make it easier to build multilingual systems, improve linguistic quality, enable re-use across system domains, and make systems more portable

Exploring User Satisfaction in a Tutorial Dialogue System

Abstract User satisfaction is a common evaluation metric in task-oriented dialogue systems, whereas tutorial dialogue systems are often evaluated in terms of student learning gain. However, user satisfaction is also important for such systems, since it may predict technology acceptance. We present a detailed satisfaction questionnaire used in evaluating the BEETLE II system (REVU-NL), and explore the underlying components of user satisfaction using factor analysis. We demonstrate interesting patterns of interaction between interpretation quality, satisfaction and the dialogue policy, highlighting the importance of more finegrained evaluation of user satisfaction

Natural interaction with a virtual guide in a virtual environment: A multimodal dialogue system

This paper describes the Virtual Guide, a multimodal dialogue system represented by an embodied conversational agent that can help users to find their way in a virtual environment, while adapting its affective linguistic style to that of the user. We discuss the modular architecture of the system, and describe the entire loop from multimodal input analysis to multimodal output generation. We also describe how the Virtual Guide detects the level of politeness of the user’s utterances in real-time during the dialogue and aligns its own language to that of the user, using different politeness strategies. Finally we report on our first user tests, and discuss some potential extensions to improve the system

Augmented robotics dialog system for enhancing human-robot interaction

Augmented reality, augmented television and second screen are cutting edge technologies that provide end users extra and enhanced information related to certain events in real time. This enriched information helps users better understand such events, at the same time providing a more satisfactory experience. In the present paper, we apply this main idea to human-robot interaction (HRI), to how users and robots interchange information. The ultimate goal of this paper is to improve the quality of HRI, developing a new dialog manager system that incorporates enriched information from the semantic web. This work presents the augmented robotic dialog system (ARDS), which uses natural language understanding mechanisms to provide two features: (i) a non-grammar multimodal input (verbal and/or written) text; and (ii) a contextualization of the information conveyed in the interaction. This contextualization is achieved by information enrichment techniques that link the extracted information from the dialog with extra information about the world available in semantic knowledge bases. This enriched or contextualized information (information enrichment, semantic enhancement or contextualized information are used interchangeably in the rest of this paper) offers many possibilities in terms of HRI. For instance, it can enhance the robot's pro-activeness during a human-robot dialog (the enriched information can be used to propose new topics during the dialog, while ensuring a coherent interaction). Another possibility is to display additional multimedia content related to the enriched information on a visual device. This paper describes the ARDS and shows a proof of concept of its applications.The authors gratefully acknowledge the funds provided by the Spanish MICINN (Ministry of Science and Innovation) through the project “Aplicaciones de los robots sociales”, DPI2011-26980 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. The research leading to these results has received funding from the RoboCity2030-III-CM project (Robótica aplicada a la mejora de la calidad de vida de los ciudadanos. fase III; S2013/MIT-2748), funded by Programas de Actividades I+D en la Comunidad de Madrid and co-funded by the Structural Funds of the EU