A task ontology model for domain independent dialogue management

Dialogue systems have been a rapidly growing area in both scientific research and commercial application since 1990s. They can be applied in various fields, such as business, healthcare and education, etc. Due to its complexity, the design and development of a dialogue system is time consuming and costly. It is highly desirable for a generic dialogue system, especially dialogue management that is independent of specific domains. Methods or architecture for domain independent dialogue systems have been proposed by previous research in literature, however each of them has its own limitations and none has been widely adopted. This paper presents a new approach, a task ontology model for domain independent dialogue management. An abstract task ontology model is developed and based on this model a generic dialogue manager is created. Knowledge about a specific task is modeled in its task ontology and retrieved by an ontology reasoning component situated in the dialogue manager. Thus the dialogue manager is task or domain independent. A dialogue system is developed based on the proposed method and experimented with two different tasks: the book borrowing and the online train ticket booking. The experiment results indicate that the dialogue system can be readily applied to tasks from different domains without any modification. This paper has implications on future research and development of domain independent dialogue systems. It also contributes to the knowledge and dialogue system reuse and will have impact on the application of dialogue systems in a wider range of areas

A multimodal restaurant finder for semantic web

Multimodal dialogue systems provide multiple modalities in the form of speech, mouse clicking, drawing or touch that can enhance human-computer interaction. However, one of the drawbacks of the existing multimodal systems is that they are highly domain-specific and they do not allow information to be shared across different providers. In this paper, we propose a semantic multimodal system, called Semantic Restaurant Finder, for the Semantic Web in which the restaurant information in different city/country/language are constructed as ontologies to allow the information to be sharable. From the Semantic Restaurant Finder, users can make use of the semantic restaurant knowledge distributed from different locations on the Internet to find the desired restaurants

A formal foundation for ontology alignment interaction models

Ontology alignment foundations are hard to find in the literature. The abstract nature of the topic and the diverse means of practice makes it difficult to capture it in a universal formal foundation. We argue that such a lack of formality hinders further development and convergence of practices, and in particular, prevents us from achieving greater levels of automation. In this article we present a formal foundation for ontology alignment that is based on interaction models between heterogeneous agents on the Semantic Web. We use the mathematical notion of information flow in a distributed system to ground our three hypotheses of enabling semantic interoperability and we use a motivating example throughout the article: how to progressively align two ontologies of research quality assessment through meaning coordination. We conclude the article with the presentation---in an executable specification language---of such an ontology-alignment interaction model

Conceptual spatial representations for indoor mobile robots

We present an approach for creating conceptual representations of human-made indoor environments using mobile robots. The concepts refer to spatial and functional properties of typical indoor environments. Following findings in cognitive psychology, our model is composed of layers representing maps at different levels of abstraction. The complete system is integrated in a mobile robot endowed with laser and vision sensors for place and object recognition. The system also incorporates a linguistic framework that actively supports the map acquisition process, and which is used for situated dialogue. Finally, we discuss the capabilities of the integrated system

On the emergent Semantic Web and overlooked issues

The emergent Semantic Web, despite being in its infancy, has already received a lotof attention from academia and industry. This resulted in an abundance of prototype systems and discussion most of which are centred around the underlying infrastructure. However, when we critically review the work done to date we realise that there is little discussion with respect to the vision of the Semantic Web. In particular, there is an observed dearth of discussion on how to deliver knowledge sharing in an environment such as the Semantic Web in effective and efficient manners. There are a lot of overlooked issues, associated with agents and trust to hidden assumptions made with respect to knowledge representation and robust reasoning in a distributed environment. These issues could potentially hinder further development if not considered at the early stages of designing Semantic Web systems. In this perspectives paper, we aim to help engineers and practitioners of the Semantic Web by raising awareness of these issues