Dialog systems and their inputs

One of the main limitations in existent domain-independent conversational agents is that the general and linguistic knowledge of these agents is limited to what the agents' developers explicitly defined. Therefore, a system which analyses user input at a deeper level of abstraction which backs its knowledge with common sense information will essentially result in a system that is capable of providing more adequate responses which in turn result in a better overall user experience. From this premise, a framework was proposed, and a working prototype was implemented upon this framework. These make use of various natural language processing tools, online and offline knowledge bases, and other information sources, to enable it to comprehend and construct relevant responses.peer-reviewe

A Proposal for Processing and Fusioning Multiple Information Sources in Multimodal Dialog Systems

Proceedings of: PAAMS 2014 International Workshops. Agent-based Approaches for the Transportation Modelling and Optimisation (AATMO' 14 ) & Intelligent Systems for Context-based Information Fusion (ISCIF' 14). Salamanca, Spain, June 4-6, 2014.Multimodal dialog systems can be defined as computer systems that process two or more user input modes and combine them with multimedia system output. This paper is focused on the multimodal input, providing a proposal to process and fusion the multiple input modalities in the dialog manager of the system, so that a single combined input is used to select the next system action. We describe an application of our technique to build multimodal systems that process user's spoken utterances, tactile and keyboard inputs, and information related to the context of the interaction. This information is divided in our proposal into external and internal context, user's internal, represented in our contribution by the detection of their intention during the dialog and their emotional state.This work was supported in part by Projects MINECO TEC2012-37832-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485)

Processing and fusioning multiple heterogeneous information sources in multimodal dialog systems

Proceedings of: 17th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2014): Salamanca, Spain 7-10 July 2014.Context-aware dialog systems must be able to process very heterogeneous information sources and user input modes. In this paper we propose a method to fuse multimodal inputs into a unified representation. This representation allows the dialog manager of the system to find the best interaction strategy and also select the next system response. We show the applicability of our proposal by means of the implementation of a dialog system that considers spoken, tactile, and also information related to the context of the interaction with its users. Context information is related to the detection of user's intention during the dialog and their emotional state (internal context), and the user's location (external context).This work was supported in part by Projects MINECO TEC2012-37832-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485).Publicad

Staging Transformations for Multimodal Web Interaction Management

Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. In addition to improving access and delivery capabilities, such interfaces enable flexible and personalized dialogs with websites, much like a conversation between humans. In this paper, we present a software framework for multimodal web interaction management that supports mixed-initiative dialogs between users and websites. A mixed-initiative dialog is one where the user and the website take turns changing the flow of interaction. The framework supports the functional specification and realization of such dialogs using staging transformations -- a theory for representing and reasoning about dialogs based on partial input. It supports multiple interaction interfaces, and offers sessioning, caching, and co-ordination functions through the use of an interaction manager. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the promise of this approach.Comment: Describes framework and software architecture for multimodal web interaction managemen

XL-NBT: A Cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework

Task-oriented dialog systems are becoming pervasive, and many companies heavily rely on them to complement human agents for customer service in call centers. With globalization, the need for providing cross-lingual customer support becomes more urgent than ever. However, cross-lingual support poses great challenges---it requires a large amount of additional annotated data from native speakers. In order to bypass the expensive human annotation and achieve the first step towards the ultimate goal of building a universal dialog system, we set out to build a cross-lingual state tracking framework. Specifically, we assume that there exists a source language with dialog belief tracking annotations while the target languages have no annotated dialog data of any form. Then, we pre-train a state tracker for the source language as a teacher, which is able to exploit easy-to-access parallel data. We then distill and transfer its own knowledge to the student state tracker in target languages. We specifically discuss two types of common parallel resources: bilingual corpus and bilingual dictionary, and design different transfer learning strategies accordingly. Experimentally, we successfully use English state tracker as the teacher to transfer its knowledge to both Italian and German trackers and achieve promising results.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted to EMNLP 2018 conferenc