217,903 research outputs found
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
Player agency in interactive narrative: audience, actor & author
The question motivating this review paper is, how can
computer-based interactive narrative be used as a constructivist learn-
ing activity? The paper proposes that player agency can be used to
link interactive narrative to learner agency in constructivist theory,
and to classify approaches to interactive narrative. The traditional
question driving research in interactive narrative is, âhow can an in-
teractive narrative deal with a high degree of player agency, while
maintaining a coherent and well-formed narrative?â This question
derives from an Aristotelian approach to interactive narrative that,
as the question shows, is inherently antagonistic to player agency.
Within this approach, player agency must be restricted and manip-
ulated to maintain the narrative. Two alternative approaches based
on Brechtâs Epic Theatre and Boalâs Theatre of the Oppressed are
reviewed. If a Boalian approach to interactive narrative is taken the
conflict between narrative and player agency dissolves. The question
that emerges from this approach is quite different from the traditional
question above, and presents a more useful approach to applying in-
teractive narrative as a constructivist learning activity
Desiderata for an Every Citizen Interface to the National Information Infrastructure: Challenges for NLP
In this paper, I provide desiderata for an interface that would enable ordinary people to properly access the capabilities of the NII. I identify some of the technologies that will be needed to achieve these desiderata, and discuss current and future research directions that could lead to the development of such technologies. In particular, I focus on the ways in which theory and techniques from natural language processing could contribute to future interfaces to the NII. Introduction The evolving national information infrastructure (NII) has made available a vast array of on-line services and networked information resources in a variety of forms (text, speech, graphics, images, video). At the same time, advances in computing and telecommunications technology have made it possible for an increasing number of households to own (or lease or use) powerful personal computers that are connected to this resource. Accompanying this progress is the expectation that people will be able to more..
The Vulnerable State and Technical Fixes: An Analysis of Official Climate Change Discourses in Nepal
I conduct discourse analysis of seven selected official climate change policies and documents of Nepal. In the first part of my analysis, I draw from international climate justice discourses to analyze how policy makers construct Nepalâs position in the global arena, in relation to the issue of climate change. In the second part, I draw from political ecology and anthropological understandings of âvulnerabilityâ and âadaptationâ to analyze how policy makers construct those terms in the context of Nepal. The result shows that Nepal has adhered to the âvulnerabilityâ and âtransitionâ discourses, which serve as important tools to advocate for financial support from the international climate change regime. Driven primarily by international processes and guidelines, the climate change policies and documents in Nepal project a heavily technocratic approach with little socio-cultural considerations. Vulnerability is understood as a static property and assessed based on sectors and geographic areas, while adaptation is understood as series of actions to be implemented. Overall, the policies are at risk of perpetuating the existing systemic ills, as well as impeding imaginaries to pursue more radical socio-political and cultural change as effective adaptation measures
Do we need dynamic semantics?
I suspect the answer to the question in the title of this paper is no. But
the scope of my paper will be considerably more limited: I will be concerned
with whether certain types of considerations that are commonly cited in
favor of dynamic semantics do in fact push us towards a dynamic semantics.
Ultimately, I will argue that the evidence points to a dynamics of discourse
that is best treated pragmatically, rather than as part of the semantics
Action! suspense! culture! insight! : reading stories in the classroom
Running title: Reading stories in the classroomAt head of title: Center for the Study of Reading.Bibliography: leaves 32-39Supported in part by the National Institute of Education under contract no. US-HEW-C-400-81-003
Collaborating on Referring Expressions
This paper presents a computational model of how conversational participants
collaborate in order to make a referring action successful. The model is based
on the view of language as goal-directed behavior. We propose that the content
of a referring expression can be accounted for by the planning paradigm. Not
only does this approach allow the processes of building referring expressions
and identifying their referents to be captured by plan construction and plan
inference, it also allows us to account for how participants clarify a
referring expression by using meta-actions that reason about and manipulate the
plan derivation that corresponds to the referring expression. To account for
how clarification goals arise and how inferred clarification plans affect the
agent, we propose that the agents are in a certain state of mind, and that this
state includes an intention to achieve the goal of referring and a plan that
the agents are currently considering. It is this mental state that sanctions
the adoption of goals and the acceptance of inferred plans, and so acts as a
link between understanding and generation.Comment: 32 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Computation Linguistics 21-
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