866 research outputs found
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..
Information Presentation in Spoken Dialogue Systems
To tackle the problem of presenting a large number of options in spoken dialogue systems, we identify compelling options based on a model of user preferences, and present tradeoffs between alternative options explicitly. Multiple attractive options are structured such that the user can gradually refine her request to find the optimal tradeoff. We show that our approach presents complex tradeoffs understandably, increases overall user satisfaction, and significantly improves the user's overview of the available options. Moreover, our results suggest that presenting users with a brief summary of the irrelevant options increases users' confidence in having heard about all relevant options
An Empirical Study of the Influence of User Tailoring on Evaluative Argument Effectiveness
The ability to generate effective evaluative arguments is critical for systems intended to advise and persuade their users. We have developed a system that generates evaluative arguments that are tailored to the user, properly arranged and concise. We have also devised an evaluation framework in which the effectiveness of evaluative arguments can be measured with real users. This paper presents the results of a formal experiment we performed in our framework to verify the influence of user tailoring on argument effectiveness.
A theoretical basis for the Harmonic Balance Method
The Harmonic Balance method provides a heuristic approach for finding
truncated Fourier series as an approximation to the periodic solutions of
ordinary differential equations. Another natural way for obtaining these type
of approximations consists in applying numerical methods. In this paper we
recover the pioneering results of Stokes and Urabe that provide a theoretical
basis for proving that near these truncated series, whatever is the way they
have been obtained, there are actual periodic solutions of the equation. We
will restrict our attention to one-dimensional non-autonomous ordinary
differential equations and we apply the results obtained to a couple of
concrete examples coming from planar autonomous systems
Learning Features that Predict Cue Usage
Our goal is to identify the features that predict the occurrence and
placement of discourse cues in tutorial explanations in order to aid in the
automatic generation of explanations. Previous attempts to devise rules for
text generation were based on intuition or small numbers of constructed
examples. We apply a machine learning program, C4.5, to induce decision trees
for cue occurrence and placement from a corpus of data coded for a variety of
features previously thought to affect cue usage. Our experiments enable us to
identify the features with most predictive power, and show that machine
learning can be used to induce decision trees useful for text generation.Comment: 10 pages, 2 Postscript figures, uses aclap.sty, psfig.te
Detection of special curves via the double resultant
We introduce several applications of the use of the double resultant through some examples of computation of different nature: special level sets of rational first integrals for rational discrete dynamical systems; remarkable values of rational first integrals of polynomial vector fields; bifurcation values in phase portraits of polynomial vector fields; and the different topologies of the offset of curves.The authors are partially supported by MINECO/ FEDER MTM2013-40998-P Grant. Johanna D. García-Saldaña is also partially supported by FONDECyT postdoctoral fellowship 3150131/2015. Armengol Gasull is also partially supported by Generalitat de Catalunya Grant 2014SGR568
Towards a Principled Representation of Discourse Plans
We argue that discourse plans must capture the intended causal and
decompositional relations between communicative actions. We present a planning
algorithm, DPOCL, that builds plan structures that properly capture these
relations, and show how these structures are used to solve the problems that
plagued previous discourse planners, and allow a system to participate
effectively and flexibly in an ongoing dialogue.Comment: requires cogsci94.sty, psfig.st
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