20,449 research outputs found
Planning Responses From High-Level Goals: Adopting the Respondent\u27s Perspective Cooperative Response Generation
Within the natural-language research community it has long been acknowledged that the conventions and pragmatics of natural-language communication often oblige dialogue systems to consider and address the underlying purposes of queries in their responses rather than answering them literally and without further comment or elaboration. Such systems cannot simply translate their users\u27 requests into transactions on database or expert systems, but must apply many more complex reasoning mechanisms to the task of selecting responses that are both appropriate and useful. This idea has given rise to a broadly-defined program of research in cooperative response generation (CRG).
Research in CRG carried on over more than a decade has yielded a substantial body of literature. Analysis of that literature, however, shows that investigators have focused primarily on modeling manifestations of cooperative behavior without directly considering the nature and motivations of the behavior itself. But if we want to develop natural language dialogue systems that are truly to function as cooperative respondents instead of serving only as models of particular kinds of cooperative responses, a different approach is required.
I identify two opposing perspectives on the process of cooperative response generation: the questioner-based and the respondent-based perspectives. I argue that past research efforts have largely been questioner-based, and that this view has led to the development of theories that are incompatible and cannot be integrated. I propose the respondent-based view as an alternative, and provide evidence that taking such a perspective might allow several interesting but otherwise poorly-understood aspects of cooperative response behavior to be modeled.
The final portion of the dissertation explores the computational implications of a respondent-based perspective. I outline the architecture of a Cooperative Response Planning System, a dialogue system that raises, reasons about, and attempts to satisfy high-level cooperative goals in its responses. This architecture constitutes a first approximation to a theory of how a system might reason from the beliefs it derives from a questioner\u27s utterances to choose a cooperative response. The processing of two sample responses in this framework is described in detail to illustrate the architecture\u27s capabilities
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A theoretical framework for computer models of cooperative dialogue, acknowledging multi-agent conflict
This thesis describes a theoretical framework for modelling cooperative dialogue. The linguistic theory is a version of speech act theory adopted from Cohen and Levesque, in which dialogue utterances are generated and interpreted pragmatically in the context of a theory of rational interaction. The latter is expressed as explicitly and formally represented principles of rational agenthood and cooperative interaction. The focus is the development of strategic principles of multi-agent interaction as such a basis for cooperative dialogue. In contrast to the majority of existing work, these acknowledge the Positive role of conflict to multi-agent cooperation. and make no assumptions regarding the benevolence and sincerity of agents. The result is a framework wherein agents can resolve conflicts by negotiation. It is a preliminary stage to the future building of computer models of cooperative dialogue for both HCI and DAI, which will therefore be more widely and generally applicable than those currently in existence.
The theory of conflict and cooperation is expressed in the different patterns of mental states which characterise multi-agent conflict, cooperation and indifference as three alternative postural relations. Agents can recognise and potentially create these. Dialogue actions are the strategic tools with which mental states can be manipulated, whilst acknowledging that agents are autonomous over their mental states; they have control over what they acquire and reveal in dialogue. Strategic principles of belief and goal adoption are described in terms of the relationships between autonomous agents' beliefs, goals, preferences, and interests, and the relation of these to action. Veracity, mendacity, concealing and revealing are defined as properties of acts. The role of all these elements in reasoning about dialogue action and conflict resolution, is tester in analyses of two example dialogues; a record of a real trade union negotiation and an extract from "Othello" by Shakespeare
Agents for educational games and simulations
This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications
The Architecture of a Cooperative Respondent
If natural language question-answering (NLQA) systems are to be truly effective and useful, they must respond to queries cooperatively, recognizing and accommodating in their replies a questioner\u27s goals, plans, and needs. Transcripts of natural dialogue demonstrate that cooperative responses typically combine several communicative acts: a question may be answered, a misconception identified, an alternative course of action described and justified. This project concerns the design of cooperative response generation systems, NLQA systems that are able to provide integrated cooperative responses.
Two questions must be answered before a cooperative NLQA system can be built. First, what are the reasoning mechanisms that underlie cooperative response generation? In partial reply, I argue that plan evaluation is an important step in the process of selecting a cooperative response, and describe several tests that may usefully be applied to inferred plans. The second question is this: what is an appropriate architecture for cooperative NLQA (CNLQA) systems? I propose a four-level decomposition of the cooperative response generation process and then present a suitable CNLQA system architecture based on the blackboard model of problem solving
Designing Embodied Interactive Software Agents for E-Learning: Principles, Components, and Roles
Embodied interactive software agents are complex autonomous, adaptive, and social software systems with a digital embodiment that enables them to act on and react to other entities (users, objects, and other agents) in their environment through bodily actions, which include the use of verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviors in face-to-face interactions with the user. These agents have been developed for various roles in different application domains, in which they perform tasks that have been assigned to them by their developers or delegated to them by their users or by other agents. In computer-assisted learning, embodied interactive pedagogical software agents have the general task to promote human learning by working with students (and other agents) in computer-based learning environments, among them e-learning platforms based on Internet technologies, such as the Virtual Linguistics Campus (www.linguistics-online.com). In these environments, pedagogical agents provide contextualized, qualified, personalized, and timely assistance, cooperation, instruction, motivation, and services for both individual learners and groups of learners.
This thesis develops a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and user-oriented view of the design of embodied interactive pedagogical software agents, which integrates theoretical and practical insights from various academic and other fields. The research intends to contribute to the scientific understanding of issues, methods, theories, and technologies that are involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of embodied interactive software agents for different roles in e-learning and other areas. For developers, the thesis provides sixteen basic principles (Added Value, Perceptible Qualities, Balanced Design, Coherence, Consistency, Completeness, Comprehensibility, Individuality, Variability, Communicative Ability, Modularity, Teamwork, Participatory Design, Role Awareness, Cultural Awareness, and Relationship Building) plus a large number of specific guidelines for the design of embodied interactive software agents and their components. Furthermore, it offers critical reviews of theories, concepts, approaches, and technologies from different areas and disciplines that are relevant to agent design. Finally, it discusses three pedagogical agent roles (virtual native speaker, coach, and peer) in the scenario of the linguistic fieldwork classes on the Virtual Linguistics Campus and presents detailed considerations for the design of an agent for one of these roles (the virtual native speaker)
Communicative act development
How do children learn to map linguistic forms onto their intended meanings? This chapter begins with an introduction to some theoretical and analytical tools used to study communicative acts. It then turns to communicative act development in spoken and signed language acquisition, including both the early scaffolding and production of communicative acts (both non-verbal and verbal) as well as their later links to linguistic development and Theory of Mind. The chapter wraps up by linking research on communicative act development to the acquisition of conversational skills, cross-linguistic and individual differences in communicative experience during development, and human evolution. Along the way, it also poses a few open questions for future research in this domain
On the Development of Adaptive and User-Centred Interactive Multimodal Interfaces
Multimodal systems have attained increased attention in recent years, which has made possible important
improvements in the technologies for recognition, processing, and generation of multimodal information.
However, there are still many issues related to multimodality which are not clear, for example, the
principles that make it possible to resemble human-human multimodal communication. This chapter
focuses on some of the most important challenges that researchers have recently envisioned for future
multimodal interfaces. It also describes current efforts to develop intelligent, adaptive, proactive, portable
and affective multimodal interfaces
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