Continuous Interaction with a Virtual Human

Attentive Speaking and Active Listening require that a Virtual Human be capable of simultaneous perception/interpretation and production of communicative behavior. A Virtual Human should be able to signal its attitude and attention while it is listening to its interaction partner, and be able to attend to its interaction partner while it is speaking – and modify its communicative behavior on-the-fly based on what it perceives from its partner. This report presents the results of a four week summer project that was part of eNTERFACE’10. The project resulted in progress on several aspects of continuous interaction such as scheduling and interrupting multimodal behavior, automatic classification of listener responses, generation of response eliciting behavior, and models for appropriate reactions to listener responses. A pilot user study was conducted with ten participants. In addition, the project yielded a number of deliverables that are released for public access

Constructing the CODA corpus: A parallel corpus ofmonologues and expository dialogues

We describe the construction of the CODA corpus, a parallel corpus of monologues and expository dialogues. The dialogue part of the corpus consists of expository, i.e., information-delivering rather than dramatic, dialogues written by several acclaimed authors. The monologue part of the corpus is a paraphrase in monologue form of these dialogues by a human annotator. The corpus was constructed as a resource for extracting rules for automated generation of dialogue from monologue. Using authored dialogues allows us to analyse the techniques used by accomplished writers for presenting information in the form of dialogue. The dialogues are annotated with dialogue acts and the monologues with rhetorical structure. We developed annotation and translation guidelines together with a custom-developed tool for carrying out translation, alignment and annotation

ClinkNotes: Towards a Corpus-Based, Machine-Aided Programme of Translation Teaching

Le présent article fait l’état des lieux d’un projet pilote relatif à la création d’une plateforme conçue pour l’enseignement de la traduction ou la formation bilingue, à grande échelle, aux études supérieures. Bien que les premiers textes utilisés dans le cadre du projet soient en anglais et en chinois, le programme, ClinkNotes, offre la possibilité de prendre en charge des corpus parallèles de n’importe quelle paire de langues. L’article débute par un bref survol de l’application des corpus à la traductologie en lien avec la formation professionnelle en traduction. Puis les caractéristiques du programme (cadre théorique, méthode d’annotation et fonctionnement) sont présentées, ainsi que la manière dont il comble les impératifs pressants de la profession. Les perspectives futures d’amélioration du programme sont également discutées.This article presents a report on a pilot project designed to construct a platform for large-scale teaching of translation or bilingual training at tertiary level. The programme, ClinkNotes, has the potential of accommodating parallel corpora of any language pairs, although the primary data used in this project are in English and Chinese. The report begins with a brief overview of the development of corpus-based approach to translation studies in relation to that of translation teaching as a profession. It then proceeds to describe the actual design (i.e., the theoretical framework, the methodology of annotation, and the simple execution of the software programme), and how it helps to cater to the pressing needs of the profession. The prospects of further development of the programme are also discussed

A Corpus-Based Investigation of Definite Description Use

We present the results of a study of definite descriptions use in written texts aimed at assessing the feasibility of annotating corpora with information about definite description interpretation. We ran two experiments, in which subjects were asked to classify the uses of definite descriptions in a corpus of 33 newspaper articles, containing a total of 1412 definite descriptions. We measured the agreement among annotators about the classes assigned to definite descriptions, as well as the agreement about the antecedent assigned to those definites that the annotators classified as being related to an antecedent in the text. The most interesting result of this study from a corpus annotation perspective was the rather low agreement (K=0.63) that we obtained using versions of Hawkins' and Prince's classification schemes; better results (K=0.76) were obtained using the simplified scheme proposed by Fraurud that includes only two classes, first-mention and subsequent-mention. The agreement about antecedents was also not complete. These findings raise questions concerning the strategy of evaluating systems for definite description interpretation by comparing their results with a standardized annotation. From a linguistic point of view, the most interesting observations were the great number of discourse-new definites in our corpus (in one of our experiments, about 50% of the definites in the collection were classified as discourse-new, 30% as anaphoric, and 18% as associative/bridging) and the presence of definites which did not seem to require a complete disambiguation.Comment: 47 pages, uses fullname.sty and palatino.st

Survey on Evaluation Methods for Dialogue Systems

In this paper we survey the methods and concepts developed for the evaluation of dialogue systems. Evaluation is a crucial part during the development process. Often, dialogue systems are evaluated by means of human evaluations and questionnaires. However, this tends to be very cost and time intensive. Thus, much work has been put into finding methods, which allow to reduce the involvement of human labour. In this survey, we present the main concepts and methods. For this, we differentiate between the various classes of dialogue systems (task-oriented dialogue systems, conversational dialogue systems, and question-answering dialogue systems). We cover each class by introducing the main technologies developed for the dialogue systems and then by presenting the evaluation methods regarding this class