The Semantics of Semantic Annotation

PACLIC 21 / Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea / November 1-3, 200

Towards Integration of Cognitive Models in Dialogue Management: Designing the Virtual Negotiation Coach Application

This paper presents an approach to flexible and adaptive dialogue management driven by cognitive modelling of human dialogue behaviour. Artificial intelligent agents, based on the ACT-R cognitive architecture, together with human actors are participating in a (meta)cognitive skills training within a negotiation scenario. The agent  employs instance-based learning to decide about its own actions and to reflect on the behaviour of the opponent. We show that task-related actions can be handled by a cognitive agent who is a plausible dialogue partner.  Separating task-related and dialogue control actions enables the application of sophisticated models along with a flexible architecture  in which  various alternative modelling methods can be combined. We evaluated the proposed approach with users assessing  the relative contribution of various factors to the overall usability of a dialogue system. Subjective perception of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction were correlated with various objective performance metrics, e.g. number of (in)appropriate system responses, recovery strategies, and interaction pace. It was observed that the dialogue system usability is determined most by the quality of agreements reached in terms of estimated Pareto optimality, by the user's negotiation strategies selected, and by the quality of system recognition, interpretation and responses. We compared human-human and human-agent performance with respect to the number and quality of agreements reached, estimated cooperativeness level, and frequency of accepted negative outcomes. Evaluation experiments showed promising, consistently positive results throughout the range of the relevant scales

Semantic and pragmatic precision in conversational AI systems

For a conversational agent, to display intelligent interactive behavior implies the ability to respond to the user's intentions and expectations with correct, consistent and relevant actions with appropriate form and content in a timely fashion. In this paper, we present a data-driven analytical approach to embed intelligence into a conversational AI agent. The method requires a certain amount of (ideally) authentic conversational data, which is transformed in a meaningful way to support intelligent dialog modeling and the design of intelligent conversational agents. These transformations rely on the ISO 24617-2 dialog act annotation standard, and are specified in the Dialogue Act Markup Language (DiAML), extended with plug-ins for articulate representations of domain-specific semantic content and customized communicative functionality. ISO 24617-2 is shown to enable systematic in-depth interaction analysis and to facilitate the collection of conversational data of sufficient quality and quantity of instances of interaction phenomena. The paper provides the theoretical and methodological background of extending the ISO standard and DiAML specifications for use in interaction analysis and conversational AI agent design. The expert-assisted design methodology is introduced, with example applications in the healthcare domain, and is validated in human-agent conversational data collection experiments

Talking about trees, scope and concepts

Cimiano P, Reyle U. Talking about trees, scope and concepts. In: Bunt H, Geertzen J, Thijse E, eds. Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS). 2005

Downward compatible revision of dialogue annotation

This paper discusses some aspects of revising the ISO standard for dialogue act annotation (ISO 24617-2). The revision is aimed at making annotations using the ISO scheme more accurate and at providing more powerful tools for building natural language based dialogue systems, without invalidating the annotated resources that have been built, with the current version of the standard. In support of the revision of the standard, an analysis is provided of the downward compatibility of a revised annotation scheme with the original scheme at the levels of abstract syntax, concrete syntax, and semantics of annotations

ISO-TimeML: An International Standard for Semantic Annotation

International audienceIn this paper, we present ISO-TimeML, a revised and interoperable version of the temporal markup language, TimeML. We describe the changes and enrichments made, while framing the effort in a more general methodology of semantic annotation. In particular, we assume a principled distinction between the annotation of an expression and the representation which that annotation denotes. This involves not only the specification of an annotation language for a particular phenomenon, but also the development of a meta-model that allows one to interpret the syntactic expressions of the specification semantically

Quantification Annotation in ISO 24617-12, Second Draft

International audienceThis paper describes the continuation of a project that aims at establishing an interoperable annotation scheme for quantification phenomena as part of the ISO suite of standards for semantic annotation, known as the Semantic Annotation Framework. After a break, caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the project was relaunched in early 2022 with a second working draft, which deals with certain issues in the annotation of quantification in a more satisfactory way than the original first working draft