Using dialogue corpora to extend information extraction patterns for natural language understanding of dialogue

This work was funded by the Companions project (www.companions-project.org) sponsored by the European Commission as part of the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme under EC grant number IST-FP6-034434.This paper examines how Natural Language Process (NLP) resources and online dialogue corpora can be used to extend coverage of Information Extraction (IE) templates in a Spoken Dialogue system. IE templates are used as part of a Natural Language Understanding module for identifying meaning in a user utterance. The use of NLP tools in Dialogue systems is a difficult task given spoken dialogue is often not well-formed and 2) there is a serious lack of dialogue data. In spite of that, we have devised a method for extending IE patterns using standard NLP tools and available dialogue corpora found on the web. In this paper, we explain our method which includes using a set of NLP modules developed using GATE (a General Architecture for Text Engineering), as well as a general purpose editing tool that we built to facilitate the IE rule creation process. Lastly, we present directions for future work in this area.peer-reviewe

Some Empirical Findings on Dialogue Management and Domain Ontologies in Dialogue Systems - Implications from an Evaluation of BIRDQUEST

In this paper we present implications for development of dialogue systems, based on an evaluation of the system BIRDQUEST which combine dialogue interaction with information extraction. A number of issues detected during the evaluation concerning primarily dialogue management, and domain knowledge representation and use are presented and discussed