Proceedings of the 11th European Agent Systems Summer School Student Session

This volume contains the papers presented at the Student Session of the 11th European Agent Systems Summer School (EASSS) held on 2nd of September 2009 at Educatorio della Providenza, Turin, Italy. The Student Session, organised by students, is designed to encourage student interaction and feedback from the tutors. By providing the students with a conference-like setup, both in the presentation and in the review process, students have the opportunity to prepare their own submission, go through the selection process and present their work to each other and their interests to their fellow students as well as internationally leading experts in the agent field, both from the theoretical and the practical sector. Table of Contents: Andrew Koster, Jordi Sabater Mir and Marco Schorlemmer, Towards an inductive algorithm for learning trust alignment . . . 5; Angel Rolando Medellin, Katie Atkinson and Peter McBurney, A Preliminary Proposal for Model Checking Command Dialogues. . . 12; Declan Mungovan, Enda Howley and Jim Duggan, Norm Convergence in Populations of Dynamically Interacting Agents . . . 19; Akın Günay, Argumentation on Bayesian Networks for Distributed Decision Making . . 25; Michael Burkhardt, Marco Luetzenberger and Nils Masuch, Towards Toolipse 2: Tool Support for the JIAC V Agent Framework . . . 30; Joseph El Gemayel, The Tenacity of Social Actors . . . 33; Cristian Gratie, The Impact of Routing on Traffic Congestion . . . 36; Andrei-Horia Mogos and Monica Cristina Voinescu, A Rule-Based Psychologist Agent for Improving the Performances of a Sportsman . . . 39; --Autonomer Agent,Agent,Künstliche Intelligenz

Process of Teaching Vocabulary to the 5th Grade Students at SDN Nglorog 3 Sragen

Triana Sri Rejeki. 2008. The Process of Teaching Vocabulary to The 5th Grade Students at SDN Nglorog III, Sragen. English Diploma Program, Faculty of Fine Arts, UNS. This final project is written based on my job training as an English teacher in SDN Nglorog 3, Sragen. The objectives of this report are to describe the process of teaching vocabulary to the 5th grade students in SDN Nglorog 3, Sragen and to show problems and solutions in teaching vocabulary. The writer collected the data by observing the classroom and teaching directly in the class. Some conclusions could be drawn after analyzing the data. In introducing English vocabulary, the teacher used some different techniques, such as: using pictures, playing games, introducing simple sentence, and bringing real object. During the job training, the writer took some activities, for instance: observing the class, making lesson plan, and teaching English. In the process of teaching vocabulary, the writer did some activities, such as: greeting, explaining, giving assignments, and testing. The writer also showed some problems in the process of teaching vocabulary. The problems were student’s motivation, facilities, and course book. The writer also presented the solution to solve the problems

Contributions of formal language theory to the study of dialogues

For more than 30 years, the problem of providing a formal framework for modeling dialogues has been a topic of great interest for the scientific areas of Linguistics, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, Formal Languages, Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence. In the beginning the goal was to develop a "conversational computer", an automated system that could engage in a conversation in the same way as humans do. After studies showed the difficulties of achieving this goal Formal Language Theory and Artificial Intelligence have contributed to Dialogue Theory with the study and simulation of machine to machine and human to machine dialogues inspired by Linguistic studies of human interactions. The aim of our thesis is to propose a formal approach for the study of dialogues. Our work is an interdisciplinary one that connects theories and results in Dialogue Theory mainly from Formal Language Theory, but also from another areas like Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics and Multiprogramming. We contribute to Dialogue Theory by introducing a hierarchy of formal frameworks for the definition of protocols for dialogue interaction. Each framework defines a transition system in which dialogue protocols might be uniformly expressed and compared. The frameworks we propose are based on finite state transition systems and Grammar systems from Formal Language Theory and a multi-agent language for the specification of dialogue protocols from Artificial Intelligence. Grammar System Theory is a subfield of Formal Language Theory that studies how several (a finite number) of language defining devices (language processors or grammars) jointly develop a common symbolic environment (a string or a finite set of strings) by the application of language operations (for instance rewriting rules). For the frameworks we propose we study some of their formal properties, we compare their expressiveness, we investigate their practical application in Dialogue Theory and we analyze their connection with theories of human-like conversation from Linguistics. In addition we contribute to Grammar System Theory by proposing a new approach for the verification and derivation of Grammar systems. We analyze possible advantages of interpreting grammars as multiprograms that are susceptible of verification and derivation using the Owicki-Gries logic, a Hoare-based logic from the Multiprogramming field

Towards a tool for the subjective assessment of speech system interfaces (SASSI)

Applications of speech recognition are now widespread, but user-centred evaluation methods are necessary to ensure their success. Objective evaluation techniques are fairly well established, but previous subjective techniques have been unstructured and unproven. This paper reports on the first stage of the development of a questionnaire measure for the Subjective Assessment of Speech System Interfaces (SASSI). The aim of the research programme is to produce a valid, reliable and sensitive measure of users' subjective experiences with speech recognition systems. Such a technique could make an important contribution to theory and practice in the design and evaluation of speech recognition systems according to best human factors practice. A prototype questionnaire was designed, based on established measures for evaluating the usability of other kinds of user interface, and on a review of the research literature into speech system design. This consisted of 50 statements with which respondents rated their level of agreement. The questionnaire was given to users of four different speech applications, and Exploratory Factor Analysis of 214 completed questionnaires was conducted. This suggested the presence of six main factors in users' perceptions of speech systems: System Response Accuracy, Likeability, Cognitive Demand, Annoyance, Habitability and Speed. The six factors have face validity, and a reasonable level of statistical reliability. The findings form a userful theoretical and practical basis for the subjective evaluation of any speech recognition interface. However, further work is recommended, to establish the validity and sensitivity of the approach, before a final tool can be produced which warrants general use

A database system for promotional literature for publishers

The aim of this thesis is to design a database system which could easily be used by a publishing company to store data concerning the products it publishes and to enable such data to be used in the regular processes of the production of lists of books and periodicals of certain promotional requirements. In our approach we have used a relational model which is based on the mathematical theory of relations. This has certain advantages over systems designed using tree or plex structures for as the database grows it will avoid causing upheaval with the logical representation of data and application programs and provides a basis for a high level retrieval language. The query language is designed to answer quickly all enquiries to the database and is based on principles and techniques developed from menu construction. The requirements of the promotional information produced by a typical publishing house are analysed and a model set up which tests the theories we have developed. In addition, the security aspect of the database has been studied and checks incorporated into the systems to ensure the authority of the personnel using the system and to provide a permanent record of all legal and illegal entries for management information

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

VOX : an extensible natural language processor

VOX is a Natural Language Processor whose knowledge can be extended by interaction with a user.VOX consists of a text analyzer and an extensibility system that share a knowledge base. The extensibility system lets the user add vocabulary, concepts, phrases, events, and scenarios to the knowledge base. The analyzer uses information obtained in this way to understand previously unhandled text.The underlying knowledge representation of VOX, called Conceptual Grammar, has been developed to meet the severe requirements of extensibility. Conceptual Grammar uniformly represents syntactic and semantic information, and permits modular addition of knowledge