20,363 research outputs found
Information extraction tools and methods for understanding dialogue in a companion
The authors' research was sponsored by the European Commission under EC grant IST-FP6-034434 (Companions).This paper discusses how Information Extraction is used to understand and manage Dialogue in the EU-funded Companions project. This will be discussed with respect to the Senior Companion, one of two applications under development in the EU-funded Companions project. Over the last few years, research in human-computer dialogue systems has increased and much attention has focused on applying learning methods to improving a key part of any dialogue system, namely the dialogue manager. Since the dialogue manager in all dialogue systems relies heavily on the quality of the semantic interpretation of the user’s utterance, our research in the Companions project, focuses on how to improve the semantic interpretation and combine it with knowledge from the Knowledge Base to increase the performance of the Dialogue Manager. Traditionally the semantic interpretation of a user utterance is handled by a natural language understanding module which embodies a variety of natural language processing techniques, from sentence splitting, to full parsing. In this paper we discuss the use of a variety of NLU processes and in particular Information Extraction as a key part of the NLU module in order to improve performance of the dialogue manager and hence the overall dialogue system.peer-reviewe
Advances in Writing Analytics: Mapping the state of the field
Writing analytics as a field is growing in terms of the tools and technologies developed to support student writing, methods to collect and analyze writing data, and the embedding of tools in pedagogical contexts to make them relevant for learning. This workshop will facilitate discussion on recent writing analytics research by researchers, writing tool developers, theorists and practitioners to map the current state of the field, identify issues and develop future directions for advances in writing analytics
A virtual diary companion
Chatbots and embodied conversational agents show turn based conversation behaviour. In current research we almost always assume that each utterance of a human conversational partner should be followed by an intelligent and/or empathetic reaction of chatbot or embodied agent. They are assumed to be alert, trying to please the user. There are other applications which have not yet received much attention and which require a more patient or relaxed attitude, waiting for the right moment to provide feedback to the human partner. Being able and willing to listen is one of the conditions for being successful. In this paper we have some observations on listening behaviour research and introduce one of our applications, the virtual diary companion
A prototype for a conversational companion for reminiscing about images
This work was funded by the COMPANIONS project sponsored by the European Commission as part of the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme under EC grant number IST-FP6-034434. Companions demonstrators can be seen at: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/∼roberta/companions/Web/.This paper describes an initial prototype of the Companions project (www.companions-project.org): the Senior Companion (SC), designed to be a platform to display novel approaches to: (1) The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an ASR phase. (2) The conversion of the input to RDF form to allow the generation of new facts from existing ones, under the control of a Dialogue Manager (DM), that also has access to stored knowledge and knowledge accessed in real time from the web, all in RDF form. (3) A DM expressed as a stack and network virtual machine that models mixed initiative in dialogue control. (4) A tuned dialogue act detector based on corpus evidence. The prototype platform was evaluated, and we describe this; it is also designed to support more extensive forms of emotion detection carried by both speech and lexical content, as well as extended forms of machine learning. We describe preliminary studies and results for these, in particular a novel approach to enabling reinforcement learning for open dialogue systems through the detection of emotion in the speech signal and its deployment as a form of a learned DM, at a higher level than the DM virtual machine and able to direct the SC’s responses to a more emotionally appropriate part of its repertoire. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.peer-reviewe
Demonstration of a prototype for a conversational companion for reminiscing about images
This work was funded by the Companions project (2006-2009) sponsored by the European Commission as part of the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme under EC grant number IST-FP6-034434.This paper describes an initial prototype demonstrator of a Companion, designed as a platform for novel approaches to the following: 1) The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) phase, 2) The conversion of the input to Resource Descriptor Format (RDF) to allow the generation of new facts from existing ones, under the control of a Dialogue Manger (DM), that also has access to stored knowledge and to open knowledge accessed in real time from the web, all in RDF form, 3) A DM implemented as a stack and network virtual machine that models mixed initiative in dialogue control, and 4) A tuned dialogue act detector based on corpus evidence. The prototype platform was evaluated, and we describe this briefly; it is also designed to support more extensive forms of emotion detection carried by both speech and lexical content, as well as extended forms of machine learning.peer-reviewe
Robust Modeling of Epistemic Mental States
This work identifies and advances some research challenges in the analysis of
facial features and their temporal dynamics with epistemic mental states in
dyadic conversations. Epistemic states are: Agreement, Concentration,
Thoughtful, Certain, and Interest. In this paper, we perform a number of
statistical analyses and simulations to identify the relationship between
facial features and epistemic states. Non-linear relations are found to be more
prevalent, while temporal features derived from original facial features have
demonstrated a strong correlation with intensity changes. Then, we propose a
novel prediction framework that takes facial features and their nonlinear
relation scores as input and predict different epistemic states in videos. The
prediction of epistemic states is boosted when the classification of emotion
changing regions such as rising, falling, or steady-state are incorporated with
the temporal features. The proposed predictive models can predict the epistemic
states with significantly improved accuracy: correlation coefficient (CoERR)
for Agreement is 0.827, for Concentration 0.901, for Thoughtful 0.794, for
Certain 0.854, and for Interest 0.913.Comment: Accepted for Publication in Multimedia Tools and Application, Special
Issue: Socio-Affective Technologie
Hierarchical RNN with Static Sentence-Level Attention for Text-Based Speaker Change Detection
Speaker change detection (SCD) is an important task in dialog modeling. Our
paper addresses the problem of text-based SCD, which differs from existing
audio-based studies and is useful in various scenarios, for example, processing
dialog transcripts where speaker identities are missing (e.g., OpenSubtitle),
and enhancing audio SCD with textual information. We formulate text-based SCD
as a matching problem of utterances before and after a certain decision point;
we propose a hierarchical recurrent neural network (RNN) with static
sentence-level attention. Experimental results show that neural networks
consistently achieve better performance than feature-based approaches, and that
our attention-based model significantly outperforms non-attention neural
networks.Comment: In Proceedings of the ACM on Conference on Information and Knowledge
Management (CIKM), 201
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