"Shouldn't I use a polarquestion?" Proper Question Forms Disentangling Inconsistencies in Dialogue Systems

This work reports on the description of a specific class of clarification requests, adopted for the negotiation of pieces of information part of the common ground for argumentation strategies in human-machine interaction. Two studies are carried out to prove the adequateness of a specific form of polar question in a specific pragmatic situation, where a presupposition is contradicted by a new evidence. Whereas the first one proves the appropriateness of the negative form, the second one also demonstrate how the use of such a form, in the aforementioned pragmatic situation, can affect the principle of robustness, in terms of observability and recoverability, important in human–machine interaction applications. Given the results obtained in the two studies, dialogue systems with such capabilities are, therefore, a desirable goal, as they are expected to lead to improved usability and naturalness in conversation. For this reason, I present here a system capable of detecting conflicts and of using argumentation strategies to signal them consistently with previous observations

Proposta de sistema de diálogo textual independente de aplicação

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciência da ComputaçãoEste trabalho propoe uma abordagem para o desenvolvimento de um sistema de dialogo. Trata-se de um sistema computacional, uma interface para humanos interagirem de forma mais natural com aplicaçoes que fornecem serviços diversos, tais como: previsao de tempo, consulta de reservas, dentre outras. Para se entender a base de funcionamento desse tipo de sistema, sao apresentados os conceitos do processamento de linguagem natural, sistema de dialogo generico e alguns exemplos de sistemas de dialogo desenvolvidos, explicitando suas caracteristicas e aplicaçoes. Com base nos conceitos e experiencias comprovadas de sistemas anteriores, apresenta-se a especificaçao de um modelo de dialogo que possui dois componentes-chaves, a saber: um componente capaz de gerenciar o dialogo por meio de principios racionais e cooperativos e outro, cujo uso da noçao computacional de ontologia toma lugar na comunicaçao entre usuarios e aplicaçoes fornecedoras de serviços. Ao final deste trabalho a proposta de um sistema de dialogo e apresentada, entretanto sua implementaçao e apenas sugerida por um exemplo, visto que o desenvolvimento de um sistema de dialogo complet

Advanced techniques for personalized, interactive question answering

Using a computer to answer questions has been a human dream since the beginning of the digital era. A first step towards the achievement of such an ambitious goal is to deal with naturallangilage to enable the computer to understand what its user asks. The discipline that studies the conD:ection between natural language and the represen~ tation of its meaning via computational models is computational linguistics. According to such discipline, Question Answering can be defined as the task that, given a question formulated in natural language, aims at finding one or more concise answers in the form of sentences or phrases. Question Answering can be interpreted as a sub-discipline of information retrieval with the added challenge of applying sophisticated techniques to identify the complex syntactic and semantic relationships present in text. Although it is widely accepted that Question Answering represents a step beyond standard infomiation retrieval, allowing a more sophisticated and satisfactory response to the user's information needs, it still shares a series of unsolved issues with the latter. First, in most state-of-the-art Question Answering systems, the results are created independently of the questioner's characteristics, goals and needs. This is a serious limitation in several cases: for instance, a primary school child and a History student may need different answers to the questlon: When did, the Middle Ages begin? Moreover, users often issue queries not as standalone but in the context of a wider information need, for instance when researching a specific topic. Although it has recently been proposed that providing Question Answering systems with dialogue interfaces would encourage and accommodate the submission of multiple related questions and handle the user's requests for clarification, interactive Question Answering is still at its early stages: Furthermore, an i~sue which still remains open in current Question Answering is that of efficiently answering complex questions, such as those invoking definitions and descriptions (e.g. What is a metaphor?). Indeed, it is difficult to design criteria to assess the correctness of answers to such complex questions. .. These are the central research problems addressed by this thesis, and are solved as follows. An in-depth study on complex Question Answering led to the development of classifiers for complex answers. These exploit a variety of lexical, syntactic and shallow semantic features to perform textual classification using tree-~ernel functions for Support Vector Machines. The issue of personalization is solved by the integration of a User Modelling corn': ponent within the the Question Answering model. The User Model is able to filter and fe-rank results based on the user's reading level and interests. The issue ofinteractivity is approached by the development of a dialogue model and a dialogue manager suitable for open-domain interactive Question Answering. The utility of such model is corroborated by the integration of an interactive interface to allow reference resolution and follow-up conversation into the core Question Answerin,g system and by its evaluation. Finally, the models of personalized and interactive Question Answering are integrated in a comprehensive framework forming a unified model for future Question Answering research

Dialogue Management for Telephone Information Systems

A distributed approach to spoken dialogue management for real-time telephone information systems is outlined. 1 Introduction The approach to dialogue management described here has been developed as part of the Sundial project (Speech UNderstanding in DIALogue) whose goal is to build realtime integrated computer systems capable of maintaining co-operative dialogues with users over standard telephone lines. 1 Systems have been developed for four languages -- French, German, Italian and English -- within the task domains of flight reservations and enquiries and train enquiries. Each system consists of five components: a speech recognition component inputs acoustic speech signals from the telephone and outputs a word lattice; a parser extracts a plausible string from the lattice and assigns it syntactic and semantic representations; a dialogue manager gives these representations an interpretation, decides how the dialogue may continue and, if it is the system's turn to speak, plans a sy..

Dialogue Management for Telephone Information Systems

this paper has been carried out as part of the Sundial project (Speech UNderstanding in DIALogue) which is currently one of the largest collaborative speech technology projects in Europ