Individual and Domain Adaptation in Sentence Planning for Dialogue

One of the biggest challenges in the development and deployment of spoken dialogue systems is the design of the spoken language generation module. This challenge arises from the need for the generator to adapt to many features of the dialogue domain, user population, and dialogue context. A promising approach is trainable generation, which uses general-purpose linguistic knowledge that is automatically adapted to the features of interest, such as the application domain, individual user, or user group. In this paper we present and evaluate a trainable sentence planner for providing restaurant information in the MATCH dialogue system. We show that trainable sentence planning can produce complex information presentations whose quality is comparable to the output of a template-based generator tuned to this domain. We also show that our method easily supports adapting the sentence planner to individuals, and that the individualized sentence planners generally perform better than models trained and tested on a population of individuals. Previous work has documented and utilized individual preferences for content selection, but to our knowledge, these results provide the first demonstration of individual preferences for sentence planning operations, affecting the content order, discourse structure and sentence structure of system responses. Finally, we evaluate the contribution of different feature sets, and show that, in our application, n-gram features often do as well as features based on higher-level linguistic representations

Automatic bilingual text document summarization.

Lo Sau-Han Silvia.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-143).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Definition of a summary --- p.2Chapter 1.2 --- Definition of text summarization --- p.3Chapter 1.3 --- Previous work --- p.4Chapter 1.3.1 --- Extract-based text summarization --- p.5Chapter 1.3.2 --- Abstract-based text summarization --- p.8Chapter 1.3.3 --- Sophisticated text summarization --- p.9Chapter 1.4 --- Summarization evaluation methods --- p.10Chapter 1.4.1 --- Intrinsic evaluation --- p.10Chapter 1.4.2 --- Extrinsic evaluation --- p.11Chapter 1.4.3 --- The TIPSTER SUMMAC text summarization evaluation --- p.11Chapter 1.4.4 --- Text Summarization Challenge (TSC) --- p.13Chapter 1.5 --- Research contributions --- p.14Chapter 1.5.1 --- Text summarization based on thematic term approach --- p.14Chapter 1.5.2 --- Bilingual news summarization based on an event-driven approach --- p.15Chapter 1.6 --- Thesis organization --- p.16Chapter 2 --- Text Summarization based on a Thematic Term Approach --- p.17Chapter 2.1 --- System overview --- p.18Chapter 2.2 --- Document preprocessor --- p.20Chapter 2.2.1 --- English corpus --- p.20Chapter 2.2.2 --- English corpus preprocessor --- p.22Chapter 2.2.3 --- Chinese corpus --- p.23Chapter 2.2.4 --- Chinese corpus preprocessor --- p.24Chapter 2.3 --- Corpus thematic term extractor --- p.24Chapter 2.4 --- Article thematic term extractor --- p.26Chapter 2.5 --- Sentence score generator --- p.29Chapter 2.6 --- Chapter summary --- p.30Chapter 3 --- Evaluation for Summarization using the Thematic Term Ap- proach --- p.32Chapter 3.1 --- Content-based similarity measure --- p.33Chapter 3.2 --- Experiments using content-based similarity measure --- p.36Chapter 3.2.1 --- English corpus and parameter training --- p.36Chapter 3.2.2 --- Experimental results using content-based similarity mea- sure --- p.38Chapter 3.3 --- Average inverse rank (AIR) method --- p.59Chapter 3.4 --- Experiments using average inverse rank method --- p.60Chapter 3.4.1 --- Corpora and parameter training --- p.61Chapter 3.4.2 --- Experimental results using AIR method --- p.62Chapter 3.5 --- Comparison between the content-based similarity measure and the average inverse rank method --- p.69Chapter 3.6 --- Chapter summary --- p.73Chapter 4 --- Bilingual Event-Driven News Summarization --- p.74Chapter 4.1 --- Corpora --- p.75Chapter 4.2 --- Topic and event definitions --- p.76Chapter 4.3 --- Architecture of bilingual event-driven news summarization sys- tem --- p.77Chapter 4.4 --- Bilingual event-driven approach summarization --- p.80Chapter 4.4.1 --- Dictionary-based term translation applying on English news articles --- p.80Chapter 4.4.2 --- Preprocessing for Chinese news articles --- p.89Chapter 4.4.3 --- Event clusters generation --- p.89Chapter 4.4.4 --- Cluster selection and summary generation --- p.96Chapter 4.5 --- Evaluation for summarization based on event-driven approach --- p.101Chapter 4.6 --- Experimental results on event-driven summarization --- p.103Chapter 4.6.1 --- Experimental settings --- p.103Chapter 4.6.2 --- Results and analysis --- p.105Chapter 4.7 --- Chapter summary --- p.113Chapter 5 --- Applying Event-Driven Summarization to a Parallel Corpus --- p.114Chapter 5.1 --- Parallel corpus --- p.115Chapter 5.2 --- Parallel documents preparation --- p.116Chapter 5.3 --- Evaluation methods for the event-driven summaries generated from the parallel corpus --- p.118Chapter 5.4 --- Experimental results and analysis --- p.121Chapter 5.4.1 --- Experimental settings --- p.121Chapter 5.4.2 --- Results and analysis --- p.123Chapter 5.5 --- Chapter summary --- p.132Chapter 6 --- Conclusions and Future Work --- p.133Chapter 6.1 --- Conclusions --- p.133Chapter 6.2 --- Future work --- p.135Bibliography --- p.137Chapter A --- English Stop Word List --- p.144Chapter B --- Chinese Stop Word List --- p.149Chapter C --- Event List Items on the Corpora --- p.151Chapter C.1 --- "Event list items for the topic ""Upcoming Philippine election""" --- p.151Chapter C.2 --- "Event list items for the topic ""German train derail"" " --- p.153Chapter C.3 --- "Event list items for the topic ""Electronic service delivery (ESD) scheme"" " --- p.154Chapter D --- The sample of an English article (9505001.xml). --- p.15

Argumentative zoning information extraction from scientific text

Let me tell you, writing a thesis is not always a barrel of laughs—and strange things can happen, too. For example, at the height of my thesis paranoia, I had a re-current dream in which my cat Amy gave me detailed advice on how to restructure the thesis chapters, which was awfully nice of her. But I also had a lot of human help throughout this time, whether things were going fine or beserk. Most of all, I want to thank Marc Moens: I could not have had a better or more knowledgable supervisor. He always took time for me, however busy he might have been, reading chapters thoroughly in two days. He both had the calmness of mind to give me lots of freedom in research, and the right judgement to guide me away, tactfully but determinedly, from the occasional catastrophe or other waiting along the way. He was great fun to work with and also became a good friend. My work has profitted from the interdisciplinary, interactive and enlightened atmosphere at the Human Communication Centre and the Centre for Cognitive Science (which is now called something else). The Language Technology Group was a great place to work in, as my research was grounded in practical applications develope

A framework for real time collaborative editing in a mobile replicated architecture

Mobile collaborative work is a developing sub-area of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW). The future of this field will be marked by a significant increase in mobile device usage as a tool for co-workers to cooperate, collaborate and work on a shared workspace in real-time to produce artefacts such as diagrams, text and graphics regardless of their geographical locations. A real-time collaboration editor can utilise a centralised or a replicated architecture. In a centralised architecture, a central server holds the shared document as well as manages the various aspects of the collaboration, such as the document consistency, ordering of updates, resolving conflicts and the session membership. Every user's action needs to be propagated to the central server, and the server will apply it to the document to ensure it results in the intended document state. Alternatively, a decentralised or replicated architecture can be used where there is no central server to store the shared document. Every participating site contains a copy of the shared document (replica) to work on separately. Using this architecture, every user's action needs to be broadcast to all participating sites so each site can update their replicas accordingly. The replicated architecture is attractive for such applications, especially in wireless and ad-hoc networks, since it does not rely on a central server and a user can continue to work on his or her own local document replica even during disconnection period. However, in the absence of a dedicated server, the collaboration is managed by individual devices. This presents challenges to implement collaborative editors in a replicated architecture, especially in a mobile network which is characterised by limited resource reliability and availability. This thesis addresses challenges and requirements to implement group editors in wireless ad-hoc network environments where resources are scarce and the network is significantly less stable and less robust than wired fixed networks. The major contribution of this thesis is a proposed framework that comprises the proposed algorithms and techniques to allow each device to manage the important aspects of collaboration such as document consistency, conflict handling and resolution, session membership and document partitioning. Firstly, the proposed document consistency algorithm ensures the document replicas held by each device are kept consistent despite the concurrent updates by the collaboration participants while taking into account the limited resource of mobile devices and mobile networks. Secondly, the proposed conflict management technique provides users with conflict status and information so that users can handle and resolve conflicts appropriately. Thirdly, the proposed membership management algorithm ensures all participants receive all necessary updates and allows users to join a currently active collaboration session. Fourthly, the proposed document partitioning algorithm provides flexibility for users to work on selected parts of the document and reduces the resource consumption. Finally, a basic implementation of the framework is presented to show how it can support a real time collaboration scenario

An insight into the evolution of mutual understanding in teamwork - Volume 1

The topic of this research is characterising and monitoring mutual understanding in multidisciplinary teamwork. Existing literature has not drawn these two themes together in great detail. This research brings together literature from these two themes. This thesis explores the nature of mutual understanding in teams, monitors its evolution in one multidisciplinary team and proposes a set of guidelines for enhancing and promoting mutual understanding in teams that communicate face-to-face and by electronic-mail (e-mail). The term ‘mutual understanding’ although commonly referred to in literature, remains a term which is not well defined. For this reason a more precise definition is necessary to identity and establish what this term actually means. In addition, the theoretical work on mutual understanding, and aspects related to mutual understanding are often limited to dyadic interactions, involving just two persons. As teams can be more than two persons more attention needs to be paid to extend existing research. Further, the process of how mutual understanding can be monitored has not been well defined, and attempts which have been made also focus on dyadic interactions. This identifies and establishes the need to characterise a method to monitor the evolution of mutual understanding in a team. In the context of teamwork, understanding and supporting team members and their tasks is necessary to work towards shared goals and objectives. Sharing information is also important and can contribute towards the progress that the team makes. Including team members who have first-hand experiences to share can also benefit the make-up of the team. However, sometimes changes need to be made to accommodate team members’ individual needs, especially when the team member in question has a disability. Additional challenges can also be encountered when the team in question is multidisciplinary due to differences in disciplinary backgrounds, practices, professional languages, understanding, cultures (disciplinary, institutional, and cultural), and assumptions in communication. Such challenges can make it harder for mutual understanding to evolve in this type of team. This thesis presents a definition for mutual understanding that can be applied to a team and a method to monitor the evolution of mutual understanding. Detailed empirical analysis of a case study looking at how mutual understanding evolves in a large multidisciplinary team that communicates as a group face- to-face once every 3- months and uses e-mail messages to stay in touch with the team at all other times is also presented. Furthermore the analysis identifies how categories or aspects of mutual understanding appear over time. This analysis can provide an insight to developers and designers in computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) to show them in detail, how a team communicates together face-to-face and by e-mail, but in the context of mutual understanding. Also based on the empirical analysis, guidelines are proposed to promote the evolution of mutual understanding in other types of teamwork. Guidelines are aimed at team members and not just the manager or leader and focus on the two forms of interactions which are the focus of this investigation, face-to-face and e-mail communication. To assess the value of the proposed guidelines a validation exercise using a separate multidisciplinary team was performed