Planning Responses From High-Level Goals: Adopting the Respondent\u27s Perspective Cooperative Response Generation

Within the natural-language research community it has long been acknowledged that the conventions and pragmatics of natural-language communication often oblige dialogue systems to consider and address the underlying purposes of queries in their responses rather than answering them literally and without further comment or elaboration. Such systems cannot simply translate their users\u27 requests into transactions on database or expert systems, but must apply many more complex reasoning mechanisms to the task of selecting responses that are both appropriate and useful. This idea has given rise to a broadly-defined program of research in cooperative response generation (CRG). Research in CRG carried on over more than a decade has yielded a substantial body of literature. Analysis of that literature, however, shows that investigators have focused primarily on modeling manifestations of cooperative behavior without directly considering the nature and motivations of the behavior itself. But if we want to develop natural language dialogue systems that are truly to function as cooperative respondents instead of serving only as models of particular kinds of cooperative responses, a different approach is required. I identify two opposing perspectives on the process of cooperative response generation: the questioner-based and the respondent-based perspectives. I argue that past research efforts have largely been questioner-based, and that this view has led to the development of theories that are incompatible and cannot be integrated. I propose the respondent-based view as an alternative, and provide evidence that taking such a perspective might allow several interesting but otherwise poorly-understood aspects of cooperative response behavior to be modeled. The final portion of the dissertation explores the computational implications of a respondent-based perspective. I outline the architecture of a Cooperative Response Planning System, a dialogue system that raises, reasons about, and attempts to satisfy high-level cooperative goals in its responses. This architecture constitutes a first approximation to a theory of how a system might reason from the beliefs it derives from a questioner\u27s utterances to choose a cooperative response. The processing of two sample responses in this framework is described in detail to illustrate the architecture\u27s capabilities

Adaptive hypertext and hypermedia : workshop : proceedings, 3rd, Sonthofen, Germany, July 14, 2001 and Aarhus, Denmark, August 15, 2001

This paper presents two empirical usability studies based on techniques from Human-Computer Interaction (HeI) and software engineering, which were used to elicit requirements for the design of a hypertext generation system. Here we will discuss the findings of these studies, which were used to motivate the choice of adaptivity techniques. The results showed dependencies between different ways to adapt the explanation content and the document length and formatting. Therefore, the system's architecture had to be modified to cope with this requirement. In addition, the system had to be made adaptable, in addition to being adaptive, in order to satisfy the elicited users' preferences

Adaptive hypertext and hypermedia : workshop : proceedings, 3rd, Sonthofen, Germany, July 14, 2001 and Aarhus, Denmark, August 15, 2001

This paper presents two empirical usability studies based on techniques from Human-Computer Interaction (HeI) and software engineering, which were used to elicit requirements for the design of a hypertext generation system. Here we will discuss the findings of these studies, which were used to motivate the choice of adaptivity techniques. The results showed dependencies between different ways to adapt the explanation content and the document length and formatting. Therefore, the system's architecture had to be modified to cope with this requirement. In addition, the system had to be made adaptable, in addition to being adaptive, in order to satisfy the elicited users' preferences

The Sixth Annual Workshop on Space Operations Applications and Research (SOAR 1992)

This document contains papers presented at the Space Operations, Applications, and Research Symposium (SOAR) hosted by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) on 4-6 Aug. 1992 and held at the JSC Gilruth Recreation Center. The symposium was cosponsored by the Air Force Material Command and by NASA/JSC. Key technical areas covered during the symposium were robotic and telepresence, automation and intelligent systems, human factors, life sciences, and space maintenance and servicing. The SOAR differed from most other conferences in that it was concerned with Government-sponsored research and development relevant to aerospace operations. The symposium's proceedings include papers covering various disciplines presented by experts from NASA, the USAF, universities, and industry

PowerAqua: Open Question Answering on the Semantic Web

With the rapid growth of semantic information in the Web, the processes of searching and querying these very large amounts of heterogeneous content have become increasingly challenging. This research tackles the problem of supporting users in querying and exploring information across multiple and heterogeneous Semantic Web (SW) sources. A review of literature on ontology-based Question Answering reveals the limitations of existing technology. Our approach is based on providing a natural language Question Answering interface for the SW, PowerAqua. The realization of PowerAqua represents a considerable advance with respect to other systems, which restrict their scope to an ontology-specific or homogeneous fraction of the publicly available SW content. To our knowledge, PowerAqua is the only system that is able to take advantage of the semantic data available on the Web to interpret and answer user queries posed in natural language. In particular, PowerAqua is uniquely able to answer queries by combining and aggregating information, which can be distributed across heterogeneous semantic resources. Here, we provide a complete overview of our work on PowerAqua, including: the research challenges it addresses; its architecture; the techniques we have realised to map queries to semantic data, to integrate partial answers drawn from different semantic resources and to rank alternative answers; and the evaluation studies we have performed, to assess the performance of PowerAqua. We believe our experiences can be extrapolated to a variety of end-user applications that wish to open up to large scale and heterogeneous structured datasets, to be able to exploit effectively what possibly is the greatest wealth of data in the history of Artificial Intelligence

Second CLIPS Conference Proceedings, volume 1

Topics covered at the 2nd CLIPS Conference held at the Johnson Space Center, September 23-25, 1991 are given. Topics include rule groupings, fault detection using expert systems, decision making using expert systems, knowledge representation, computer aided design and debugging expert systems

The building and application of a semantic platform for an e-research society

This thesis reviews the area of e-Research (the use of electronic infrastructure to support research) and considers how the insight gained from the development of social networking sites in the early 21st century might assist researchers in using this infrastructure. In particular it examines the myExperiment project, a website for e-Research that allows users to upload, share and annotate work flows and associated files, using a social networking framework. This Virtual Organisation (VO) supports many of the attributes required to allow a community of users to come together to build an e-Research society. The main focus of the thesis is how the emerging society that is developing out of my-Experiment could use Semantic Web technologies to provide users with a significantly richer representation of their research and research processes to better support reproducible research. One of the initial major contributions was building an ontology for myExperiment. Through this it became possible to build an API for generating and delivering this richer representation and an interface for querying it. Having this richer representation it has been possible to follow Linked Data principles to link up with other projects that have this type of representation. Doing this has allowed additional data to be provided to the user and has begun to set in context the data produced by myExperiment. The way that the myExperiment project has gone about this task and consideration of how changes may affect existing users, is another major contribution of this thesis. Adding a semantic representation to an emergent e-Research society like myExperiment,has given it the potential to provide additional applications. In particular the capability to support Research Objects, an encapsulation of a scientist's research or research process to support reproducibility. The insight gained by adding a semantic representation to myExperiment, has allowed this thesis to contribute towards the design of the architecture for these Research Objects that use similar Semantic Web technologies. The myExperiment ontology has been designed such that it can be aligned with other ontologies. Scientific Discourse, the collaborative argumentation of different claims and hypotheses, with the support of evidence from experiments, to construct, confirm or disprove theories requires the capability to represent experiments carried out in silico. This thesis discusses how, as part of the HCLS Scientific Discourse subtask group, the myExperiment ontology has begun to be aligned with other scientific discourse ontologies to provide this capability. It also compares this alignment of ontologies with the architecture for Research Objects. This thesis has also examines how myExperiment's Linked Data and that of other projects can be used in the design of novel interfaces. As a theoretical exercise, it considers how this Linked Data might be used to support a Question-Answering system, that would allow users to query myExperiment's data in a more efficient and user-friendly way. It concludes by reviewing all the steps undertaken to provide a semantic platform for an emergent e-Research society to facilitate the sharing of research and its processes to support reproducible research. It assesses their contribution to enhancing the features provided by myExperiment, as well as e-Research as a whole. It considers how the contributions provided by this thesis could be extended to produce additional tools that will allow researchers to make greater use of the rich data that is now available, in a way that enhances their research process rather than significantly changing it or adding extra workload

VideoTag: Encouraging the Effective Tagging of Internet Videos Through Tagging Games

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyAbstract The tags and descriptions entered by video owners in video sharing sites are typically inadequate for retrieval purposes, yet the majority of video search still uses this text. This problem is escalating due to the ease with which users can self-publish videos, generating masses that are poorly labelled and poorly described. This thesis investigates how users tag videos and whether video tagging games can solve this problem by generating useful sets of tags. A preliminary study investigated tags in two social video sharing sites, YouTube and Viddler. YouTube contained many irrelevant tags because the system does not encourage users to tag their videos and does not promote tags as useful. In contrast, using tags as the sole means of categorisation in Viddler motivated users to enter a higher proportion of relevant tags. Poor tags were found in both systems, however, highlighting the need to improve video tagging. In order to give users incentives to tag videos, the VideoTag project in this thesis developed two tagging games, Golden Tag and Top Tag, and one non-game tagging system, Simply Tag, and conducted two experiments with them. In the first experiment VideoTag was a portal to play video tagging games whereas in the second experiment it was a portal to curate collections of special interest videos. Users preferred to tag videos using games, generating tags that were relevant to the videos and that covered a range of tag types that were descriptive of the video content at a predominately specific, objective level. Users were motivated by interest in the content rather than by game elements, and content had an effect on the tag types used. In each experiment, users predominately tagged videos using objective language, with a tendency to use specific rather than basic tags. There was a significant difference between the types of tags entered in the games and in Simply Tag, with more basic, objective vocabulary entered into the games and more specific, objective language entered into the non-game system. Subjective tags were rare but were more frequent in Simply Tag. Gameplay also had an influence on the types of tags entered; Top Tag generated more basic tags and Golden Tag generated more specific and subjective tags. Users were not attracted to use VideoTag by the games alone. Game mechanics had little impact on motivations to use the system. VideoTag used YouTube videos, but could not upload the tags to YouTube and so users could see no benefit for the tags they entered, reducing participation. Specific interest content was more of a motivator for use than games or tagging and that this warrants further research. In the current game-saturated climate, gamification of a video tagging system may therefore be most successful for collections of videos that already have a committed user base.University of Wolverhampto

Planning multisentential English text using communicative acts

The goal of this research is to develop explanation presentation mechanisms for knowledge based systems which enable them to define domain terminology and concepts, narrate events, elucidate plans, processes, or propositions and argue to support a claim or advocate action. This requires the development of devices which select, structure, order and then linguistically realize explanation content as coherent and cohesive English text. With the goal of identifying generic explanation presentation strategies, a wide range of naturally occurring texts were analyzed with respect to their communicative sttucture, function, content and intended effects on the reader. This motivated an integrated theory of communicative acts which characterizes text at the level of rhetorical acts (e.g., describe, define, narrate), illocutionary acts (e.g., inform, request), and locutionary acts (e.g., ask, command). Taken as a whole, the identified communicative acts characterize the structure, content and intended effects of four types of text: description, narration, exposition, argument. These text types have distinct effects such as getting the reader to know about entities, to know about events, to understand plans, processes, or propositions, or to believe propositions or want to perform actions. In addition to identifying the communicative function and effect of text at multiple levels of abstraction, this dissertation details a tripartite theory of focus of attention (discourse focus, temporal focus, and spatial focus) which constrains the planning and linguistic realization of text. To test the integrated theory of communicative acts and tripartite theory of focus of attention, a text generation system TEXPLAN (Textual EXplanation PLANner) was implemented that plans and linguistically realizes multisentential and multiparagraph explanations from knowledge based systems. The communicative acts identified during text analysis were formalized as over sixty compositional and (in some cases) recursive plan operators in the library of a hierarchical planner. Discourse, temporal, and spatial focus models were implemented to track and use attentional information to guide the organization and realization of text. Because the plan operators distinguish between the communicative function (e.g., argue for a proposition) and the expected effect (e.g., the reader believes the proposition) of communicative acts, the system is able to construct a discourse model of the structure and function of its textual responses as well as a user model of the expected effects of its responses on the reader's knowledge, beliefs, and desires. The system uses both the discourse model and user model to guide subsequent utterances. To test its generality, the system was interfaced to a variety of domain applications including a neuropsychological diagnosis system, a mission planning system, and a knowledge based mission simulator. The system produces descriptions, narrations, expositions, and arguments from these applications, thus exhibiting a broader range of rhetorical coverage than previous text generation systems

Making intelligent systems team players: Case studies and design issues. Volume 1: Human-computer interaction design

Initial results are reported from a multi-year, interdisciplinary effort to provide guidance and assistance for designers of intelligent systems and their user interfaces. The objective is to achieve more effective human-computer interaction (HCI) for systems with real time fault management capabilities. Intelligent fault management systems within the NASA were evaluated for insight into the design of systems with complex HCI. Preliminary results include: (1) a description of real time fault management in aerospace domains; (2) recommendations and examples for improving intelligent systems design and user interface design; (3) identification of issues requiring further research; and (4) recommendations for a development methodology integrating HCI design into intelligent system design