19,684 research outputs found
A Plan-Based Model for Response Generation in Collaborative Task-Oriented Dialogues
This paper presents a plan-based architecture for response generation in
collaborative consultation dialogues, with emphasis on cases in which the
system (consultant) and user (executing agent) disagree. Our work contributes
to an overall system for collaborative problem-solving by providing a
plan-based framework that captures the {\em Propose-Evaluate-Modify} cycle of
collaboration, and by allowing the system to initiate subdialogues to negotiate
proposed additions to the shared plan and to provide support for its claims. In
addition, our system handles in a unified manner the negotiation of proposed
domain actions, proposed problem-solving actions, and beliefs proposed by
discourse actions. Furthermore, it captures cooperative responses within the
collaborative framework and accounts for why questions are sometimes never
answered.Comment: 8 pages, to appear in the Proceedings of AAAI-94. LaTeX source file,
requires aaai.sty and epsf.tex. Figures included in separate file
Collaborating on Referring Expressions
This paper presents a computational model of how conversational participants
collaborate in order to make a referring action successful. The model is based
on the view of language as goal-directed behavior. We propose that the content
of a referring expression can be accounted for by the planning paradigm. Not
only does this approach allow the processes of building referring expressions
and identifying their referents to be captured by plan construction and plan
inference, it also allows us to account for how participants clarify a
referring expression by using meta-actions that reason about and manipulate the
plan derivation that corresponds to the referring expression. To account for
how clarification goals arise and how inferred clarification plans affect the
agent, we propose that the agents are in a certain state of mind, and that this
state includes an intention to achieve the goal of referring and a plan that
the agents are currently considering. It is this mental state that sanctions
the adoption of goals and the acceptance of inferred plans, and so acts as a
link between understanding and generation.Comment: 32 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Computation Linguistics 21-
A Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations
Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly
difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases.
Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type,
such as movies or restaurants, but are still somewhat awkward to use. Our
solution is to take advantage of the complementary strengths of personalized
recommendation systems and dialogue systems, creating personalized aides. We
present a system -- the Adaptive Place Advisor -- that treats item selection as
an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item
attributes and the user responding. Individual, long-term user preferences are
unobtrusively obtained in the course of normal recommendation dialogues and
used to direct future conversations with the same user. We present a novel user
model that influences both item search and the questions asked during a
conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in significantly
reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory
item, as compared to a control group of users interacting with a non-adaptive
version of the system
Improvising Linguistic Style: Social and Affective Bases for Agent Personality
This paper introduces Linguistic Style Improvisation, a theory and set of
algorithms for improvisation of spoken utterances by artificial agents, with
applications to interactive story and dialogue systems. We argue that
linguistic style is a key aspect of character, and show how speech act
representations common in AI can provide abstract representations from which
computer characters can improvise. We show that the mechanisms proposed
introduce the possibility of socially oriented agents, meet the requirements
that lifelike characters be believable, and satisfy particular criteria for
improvisation proposed by Hayes-Roth.Comment: 10 pages, uses aaai.sty, lingmacros.sty, psfig.st
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