Topic Independent Identification of Agreement and Disagreement in Social Media Dialogue

Research on the structure of dialogue has been hampered for years because large dialogue corpora have not been available. This has impacted the dialogue research community's ability to develop better theories, as well as good off the shelf tools for dialogue processing. Happily, an increasing amount of information and opinion exchange occur in natural dialogue in online forums, where people share their opinions about a vast range of topics. In particular we are interested in rejection in dialogue, also called disagreement and denial, where the size of available dialogue corpora, for the first time, offers an opportunity to empirically test theoretical accounts of the expression and inference of rejection in dialogue. In this paper, we test whether topic-independent features motivated by theoretical predictions can be used to recognize rejection in online forums in a topic independent way. Our results show that our theoretically motivated features achieve 66% accuracy, an improvement over a unigram baseline of an absolute 6%.Comment: @inproceedings{Misra2013TopicII, title={Topic Independent Identification of Agreement and Disagreement in Social Media Dialogue}, author={Amita Misra and Marilyn A. Walker}, booktitle={SIGDIAL Conference}, year={2013}

Understanding Focus: Pitch, Placement and Coherence

This paper presents a novel account of focal stress and pitch contour in English dialogue. We argue that one should analyse and treat focus and pitch contour jointly, since (i) some pragmatic interpretations vary with contour (e.g., whether an utterance accepts or rejects; or whether it implicates a positive or negative answer); and (ii) there are utterances with identical prosodic focus that in the same context are infelicitous with one contour, but felicitous with another. We offer an account of two distinct pitch contours that predicts the correct felicity judgements and implicatures, outclassing other models in empirical coverage or formality. Prosodic focus triggers a presupposition, where what is presupposed and how the presupposition is resolved depends on prosodic contour. If resolving the presupposition entails the proffered content, then the proffered content is uninteresting and hence the utterance is in-felicitous. Otherwise, resolving the presupposition may lead to an implicature. We regiment this account in SDRT

Inferring Inferences: Relational Propositions for Argument Mining

Inferential reasoning is an essential feature of argumentation. Therefore, a method for mining discourse for inferential structures would be of value for argument analysis and assessment. The logic of relational propositions is a procedure for rendering texts as expressions in propositional logic directly from their rhetorical structures. From rhetorical structures, relational propositions are defined, and from these propositions, logical expressions are then generated. There are, however, unsettled issues associated with Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), some of which are problematic for inference mining. This paper takes a deep dive into some of these issues, with the aim of elucidating the problems and providing guidance for how they may be resolved

But What Do They Mean? Modelling Contrast Between Speakers in Dialogue Signalled by “But”

Institute for Communicating and Collaborative SystemsUnderstanding what is being communicated in a dialogue involves determining how it is coherent, that is, how the successive turns in the dialogue are related, what the speakers’ intentions, goals, beliefs, and expectations are and how they relate to each other’s responses. This thesis aims to address how turns in dialogue are related when one speaker indicates contrast with something in the preceding discourse signalled by “but”. Different relations cued by “but” will be distinguished and characterised when they relate material spanning speaker turns and an implementation in a working dialogue system is specified with the aim of enabling a better model of dialogue understanding and achieving more precise response generation. A large amount of research in discourse addresses coherence in monologue, and much of it focuses on cases in which the coherence relation is explicitly signalled via a cue-phrase or discourse marker (e.g., “on the other hand”, “but”, et cetera) which provides an explicit cue about the nature of the underlying relation linking the two clauses. However despite research on Speech Acts, planning research into speakers’ intentions, and semantic approaches to question-answering dialogues, very little work has focused on coherence relations across turns in dialogue even given the presence of a cue-phrase. This thesis will explore what sorts of relations the speaker of the “but” perceives between elements in the dialogue, and in particular, it will focus on “but”s communicating Denial of Expectation, Concession, and Correction by determining what underlying cross-turn expectations are denied in the former two, and what is being corrected in the latter case. We will extend work by Lagerwerf (1998) in monologue which presents a treatment for Denial of Expectation and Concession arguing that “but” implicates a defeasible expectation which is then denied (in Denial of Expectation) or argued against (in Concession). We also follow Knott’s approach (Knott, 1999a) of describing the semantics of a cue-phrase algorithmically from the agent’s mental model of the related utterances. Task-oriented and nontask-oriented spoken dialogues involving turn-initial “but” are examined, motivating a logical scheme whereby Denial of Expectation, Concession and Correction can be distinguished. These relations are then modelled in the PTT (Poesio and Traum, 1998) Information State (Matheson, Poesio and Traum, 2000) model of dialogue, enabling more relevant response generation in dialogue systems

A Model of Redundant Information in Dialogue: The Role of Resource Bounds (Dissertation Proposal)

This document is a proposal of research intended to complete a Ph.D. in Computer Science. The overall goal of the proposed work is to demonstrate a connection between agents as limited reasoners and the use of informationally redundant utterances in problem-solving dialogues. This document describes some long range objectives and some preliminary results toward this goal. Comments from readers on the proposed work would be most welcome

Evaluating the effectiveness of explanations for recommender systems : Methodological issues and empirical studies on the impact of personalization

Peer reviewedPostprin

Cognitive features of indirect speech acts

The offer of some cake can be declined by saying “I am on a diet” – an indirect reply. Here, we asked whether certain well-established psychological and conceptual features are linked to the (in)directness of speech acts – an issue unexplored so far. Subjects rated direct and indirect speech acts performed by the same critical linguistic forms in different dialogic contexts. We find that indirect replies were understood with less certainty, were less predictable by, less coherent with and less semantically similar to their context question. These effects were smaller when direct and indirect replies were matched for the type of speech acts for which they were used, compared to when they were not speech act matched. Crucially, all measured cognitive dimensions were strongly associated with each other. These findings suggest that indirectness goes hand-in-hand with a set of cognitive features, which should be taken into account when interpreting experimental findings, including neuroimaging studies of indirectness