Modeling the dialogue aspects of an information system.

In this paper we investigate techniques offered by current object-oriented development methods for the specification of the user-system dialogue aspect of a software system. Current development methods do not give very extensive guidelines on how to model this aspect and the available techniques need some refinement and elaboration to fit this particular task in the software specification process. The paper first compares a number of approaches. The common elements of these approaches are summarized and further developed into one comprehensive set of techniques that addresses the needs of functional requirements analysis.

Do (and say) as I say: Linguistic adaptation in human-computer dialogs

© Theodora Koulouri, Stanislao Lauria, and Robert D. Macredie. This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is strong research evidence showing that people naturally align to each other’s vocabulary, sentence structure, and acoustic features in dialog, yet little is known about how the alignment mechanism operates in the interaction between users and computer systems let alone how it may be exploited to improve the efficiency of the interaction. This article provides an account of lexical alignment in human–computer dialogs, based on empirical data collected in a simulated human–computer interaction scenario. The results indicate that alignment is present, resulting in the gradual reduction and stabilization of the vocabulary-in-use, and that it is also reciprocal. Further, the results suggest that when system and user errors occur, the development of alignment is temporarily disrupted and users tend to introduce novel words to the dialog. The results also indicate that alignment in human–computer interaction may have a strong strategic component and is used as a resource to compensate for less optimal (visually impoverished) interaction conditions. Moreover, lower alignment is associated with less successful interaction, as measured by user perceptions. The article distills the results of the study into design recommendations for human–computer dialog systems and uses them to outline a model of dialog management that supports and exploits alignment through mechanisms for in-use adaptation of the system’s grammar and lexicon

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Multi-level Memory for Task Oriented Dialogs

Recent end-to-end task oriented dialog systems use memory architectures to incorporate external knowledge in their dialogs. Current work makes simplifying assumptions about the structure of the knowledge base, such as the use of triples to represent knowledge, and combines dialog utterances (context) as well as knowledge base (KB) results as part of the same memory. This causes an explosion in the memory size, and makes the reasoning over memory harder. In addition, such a memory design forces hierarchical properties of the data to be fit into a triple structure of memory. This requires the memory reader to infer relationships across otherwise connected attributes. In this paper we relax the strong assumptions made by existing architectures and separate memories used for modeling dialog context and KB results. Instead of using triples to store KB results, we introduce a novel multi-level memory architecture consisting of cells for each query and their corresponding results. The multi-level memory first addresses queries, followed by results and finally each key-value pair within a result. We conduct detailed experiments on three publicly available task oriented dialog data sets and we find that our method conclusively outperforms current state-of-the-art models. We report a 15-25% increase in both entity F1 and BLEU scores.Comment: Accepted as full paper at NAACL 201

Declarative Specification

Deriving formal specifications from informal requirements is extremely difficult since one has to overcome the conceptual gap between an application domain and the domain of formal specification methods. To reduce this gap we introduce application-specific specification languages, i.e., graphical and textual notations that can be unambiguously mapped to formal specifications in a logic language. We describe a number of realised approaches based on this idea, and evaluate them with respect to their domain specificity vs. generalit

Evaluating musical software using conceptual metaphors

An open challenge for interaction designers is to find ways of designing software to enhance the ability of novices to perform tasks that normally require specialized domain expertise. This challenge is particularly demanding in areas such as music analysis, where complex, abstract, domain-specific concepts and notations occur. One promising theoretical foundation for this work involves the identification of conceptual metaphors and image schemas, found by analyzing discourse. This kind of analysis has already been applied, with some success, both to musical concepts and, separately, to user interface design. The present work appears to be the first to combine these hitherto distinct bodies of research, with the aim of devising a general method for improving user interfaces for music. Some areas where this may require extensions to existing method are noted. This paper presents the results of an exploratory evaluation of Harmony Space, a tool for playing, analysing and learning about harmony. The evaluation uses conceptual metaphors and image schemas elicited from the dialogues of experienced musicians discussing the harmonic progressions in a piece of music. Examples of where the user interface supports the conceptual metaphors, and where support could be improved, are discussed. The potential use of audio output to support conceptual metaphors and image schemas is considered

The BURCHAK corpus: a Challenge Data Set for Interactive Learning of Visually Grounded Word Meanings

We motivate and describe a new freely available human-human dialogue dataset for interactive learning of visually grounded word meanings through ostensive definition by a tutor to a learner. The data has been collected using a novel, character-by-character variant of the DiET chat tool (Healey et al., 2003; Mills and Healey, submitted) with a novel task, where a Learner needs to learn invented visual attribute words (such as " burchak " for square) from a tutor. As such, the text-based interactions closely resemble face-to-face conversation and thus contain many of the linguistic phenomena encountered in natural, spontaneous dialogue. These include self-and other-correction, mid-sentence continuations, interruptions, overlaps, fillers, and hedges. We also present a generic n-gram framework for building user (i.e. tutor) simulations from this type of incremental data, which is freely available to researchers. We show that the simulations produce outputs that are similar to the original data (e.g. 78% turn match similarity). Finally, we train and evaluate a Reinforcement Learning dialogue control agent for learning visually grounded word meanings, trained from the BURCHAK corpus. The learned policy shows comparable performance to a rule-based system built previously.Comment: 10 pages, THE 6TH WORKSHOP ON VISION AND LANGUAGE (VL'17