Dialogue Understanding in a Logic of Action and Belief

Abstract In recent work, Langley et al. (2014) introduced UMBRA, a system for plan and dialogue understanding. The program applies a form of abductive inference to generate explanations incrementally from relational descriptions of observed behavior and knowledge in the form of rules. Although UM-BRA's creators described the system architecture, knowledge, and inferences, along with experimental studies of its operation, they did not provide a formalization of its structures or processes. In this paper, we analyze both aspects of the architecture in terms of the Situation Calculus-a classical logic for reasoning about dynamical systems-and give a specification of the inference task the system performs. After this, we state some properties of this formalization that are desirable for the task of incremental dialogue understanding. We conclude by discussing related work and describing our plans for additional research

Query types in the meeting domain: assessing the role of argumentative structure in answering questions on meeting discussion records

We define a new task of question answering on meeting records and assess its difficulty in terms of types of information and retrieval techniques required. The importance of this task is revealed by the increasingly growing interest in the design of sophisticated interfaces for accessing meeting records such as meeting browsers. We ground our work on the empirical analysis of elicited user queries. We assess what is the type of information sought by the users and perform a user query classification along several semantic dimensions of the meeting content. We found that queries about argumentative processes and outcomes represent the majority among the elicited queries (about 60%). We also assess the difficulty in answering the queries and focus on the requirements of a prospective QA system to successfully deal with them. Our results suggest that standard Information Retrieval and Question Answering alone can only account for less than 20% of the queries and need to be completed with additional type of information and inference

Unpacking The Give And Take Of Social Exchange: Three Essays Concerning The Influence Of Social Exchange Contributions And Receipts In Team Member And Negotiation Relationships

In this dissertation, I examine the social exchange relationships inherent in group settings. These relationships rely on a series of contributions and receipts between individual participants – the give and take of social exchange. I propose that by examining the interactive effects of individual social exchange contributions and receipts, we can more accurately conceptualize and measure interpersonal dynamics in team and negotiation contexts. Although social exchange theory was developed with both sides of the exchange in mind, researchers generally combine contributions and receipts into overall relationship quality. As such, they fail to acknowledge that individuals evaluate the quality of their relationships via the pattern of contributions and receipts. The purpose of my dissertation is to improve the understanding and prediction of individual responses to social exchange interactions in diverse organizational and cultural circumstances. I conduct empirical studies in domestic and global teams contexts, as well as developing a process model related to the negotiation setting. In sum, I contribute to the management literature by refining our theoretical understanding of social exchange dynamics and by providing practical advice for improving teamwork and negotiation outcomes

The agreement process: an empirical investigation of human-human computer-mediated collaborative dialogs

this paper, we investigate the empirical correlates of the agreement process. Informally, the agreement process is the dialogue process by which collaborators achieve joint commitment on a joint action. We propose a specific instantiation of the agreement process, derived from our theoretical model, that integrates the IRMA framework for rational problem solving (Bratman, Israel, and Pollack 1988) with Clark's work (1992; 1996) on language as a collaborative activity; and from the characteristics of our task, a simple design problem (furnishing a two room apartment) in which knowledge is equally distributed among agents, and needs to be shared. The main contribution of our paper is an empirical study of some of the components of the agreement process. We first discuss why we believe the findings from our corpus of computer-mediated dialogues are applicable to human-human collaborative dialogues in general. We then present our theoretical model, and apply it to make predictions about the components of the agreement process. We focus on how information is exchanged in order to arrive at a proposal, and on what constitutes a proposal and its acceptance / rejection. Our corpus study makes use of features of both the dialogue and the domain reasoning situation, and led us to discover that the notion of commitment is more useful to model the agreement process than that of acceptance / rejection, as it more closely relates to the unfolding of negotiation

La mesure de la similarité entre les points de vue de l'usager et de son agent artificiel à l'aide de la logique terminologique

Les systèmes multi-agents actuels ne prennent pas en considération les problèmes de cohabitation entre un usager et son homologue agent virtuel agissant en son nom ?on behalf-, tels que l'intégration de l'utilisateur dans la même boucle de réalisation d'une tâche commune - usager dans la boucle - et les conflits terminologiques liés à l'utilisation de termes différents pour décrire leurs opinions (points de vue) à propos d'une situation de résolution d'un problème. La cohabitation usager-agent nécessite donc une compréhension mutuelle, ce qui signifie que les deux entités devront être aptes à comparer leurs points de vue respectifs avant la prise d'initiatives. Par conséquent, la question qui se pose est la suivante: dans quelle mesure les deux points de vue (utilisateur et agent) peuvent ou non se rapprocher? Ce travail de recherche vise à contribuer au processus général d'intégration d'un usager dans la boucle de réalisation d'une tâche conjointe. Il propose une approche de comparaison des points de vue dans un contexte de planification par initiatives mixtes. L'approche théorique proposée s'appuie sur la logique terminologique pour décrire les ontologies des points de vue de l'utilisateur et de l'agent. La méthode de comparaison des points de vue proposée dans ce mémoire permettra d'extraire une mesure de leur similarité, servant à prendre une décision sécuritaire. Ce mémoire se veut une première phase d'un projet de recherche beaucoup plus large, visant le développement d'une approche générique d'intégration des points de vue. Il doit donc être considéré comme un pas en avant vers la réalisation de ce projet d'envergure ainsi qu'une contribution au domaine de la coopération entre un usager et son agent artificiel

Development and Specification of Virtual Environments

This thesis concerns the issues involved in the development of virtual environments (VEs). VEs are more than virtual reality. We identify four main characteristics of them: graphical interaction, multimodality, interface agents, and multi-user. These characteristics are illustrated with an overview of different classes of VE-like applications, and a number of state-of-the-art VEs. To further define the topic of research, we propose a general framework for VE systems development, in which we identify five major classes of development tools: methodology, guidelines, design specification, analysis, and development environments. Of each, we give an overview of existing best practices