Utterance generation for transaction dialogues

This paper discusses the utterance generation module of a spoken dialogue system for transactions. Transactions are interesting because they involve obligations of both parties: the system should provide all relevant information; the user should feel committed to the transaction once it has been concluded. Utterance generation plays a major role in this. The utterance generation module works with prosodically annotated utterance templates. An appropriate template for a given dialogue act is selected by the following parameters: utterance type, body of the template, given information, wanted and new information. Templates respect rules of accenting and deaccenting

The Role of Trust in Government Control of Businesses

Governments have the responsibility to control whether businesses are compliant with regulations in various areas such as health, safety, security, tax and customs. Traditionally, this control is exercised in a command-and-control fashion: businesses provide data to the control agencies, and in addition these agencies perform inspections of the businesses. To reduce administrative burden, governments are investigating `horizontal’ governance models, built on the responsibility and participation of companies. The information needs of both companies and agencies are changing and trust is now playing a more prominent role. Appropriate information management, supported by IT systems helps the trust relation to evolve. The model of transitional stages of trust (Lewicki and Bunker) identifies information needs per trust level. In this paper we link ‘horizontal’ governance strategies with the trust levels of lewicki and Bunker to identify information needs. Information needs determine requirements for enterprise information systems and eGovernment applications. We define hypotheses about the trust levels and information needs of ‘horizontal’ governance strategies. The hypotheses are evaluated in a case study of the system-based control approach of Dutch Tax and Customs Administration. We find that system-based control corresponds to knowledge-based trust, and that the information which must be gathered corresponds with both calculus-based and knowledge-based trust

TOWARDS SMART MANUFACTURING: COMPLIANCE MONITORING FOR COMPUTATIONAL AUDITING

Manufacturers operating in international markets are faced with complex rules and regulations that must be complied with in order to trade successfully. A general phenomenon among international enterprises is that, when they are conducting business across borders, their internal information systems fail to interface well with systems or platforms built specially for compliance reports. This leads to inventory mismatch and results in other types of problems, such as delay of goods delivery or incorrect duty payment. One of the main difficulties in fully integrating information systems arises from the highly flexible and volatile nature of manufacturing processes, which would need highly customizable and adaptive information systems. Currently, there is a lack of systematic method to monitor compliance within flexible multinational manufacturing processes and supply chains. Moreover, improper operations could hamper compliance even normal business processes. In order to have well integrated systems as well as timely detection and mitigation of compliance faults, data processing tools are needed to identify and diagnose inconsistencies in manufacturing and inventory management. This research aims to innovate accounting information systems by designing a framework with the application of process mining and engineering techniques in computational auditing. An in-depth case study is conducted for research validation

On the Representation of Deadlines in a Rental Agreement

The paper provides a conceptual analysis of deadlines, represented in Temporal Modal Defeasible Logic. The typology is based on the following parameters: kind of deontic operator, maintenance or achievement, presence of explicit sanctions, and persistence after the deadline. The adequacy of the typology is validated against a case study of a rental agreement

Dialogues with a talking face for web-based services and transactions

In this paper we discuss our research on interactions in a virtual theatre that has been built using VRML and therefore can be accessed through Web pages. In\ud the virtual environment we employ several agents. The virtual theatre allows navigation input through keyboard and mouse, but there is also a navigation\ud agent which listens to typed input and spoken commands. Feedback of the system is given using speech synthesis. We also have an information agent which allows a natural language dialogue with the system where the input is keyboard-driven and the output is both with tables as with template driven natural language generation. In development are several talking faces for the different agents in the virtual world. At this moment an avatar with a cartoon-like talking face driven by a text-to-speech synthesizer can provide users with information about performances in the theatre

Early requirements engineering for e-customs decision support: Assessing overlap in mental models

Abstract. Developing decision support systems is a complex process. It involves stakeholders with diverging interpretations of the task and domain. In this paper, we propose to use ontology mapping to make a detailed analysis of the overlaps and differences between mental models of stakeholders. The technique is applied to an extensive case study about EU customs regulations. Companies which can demonstrate to be ‘in control ’ of the safety and security in the supply chain, may become ‘Authorized Economic Operator ’ (AEO), and avoid inspections by customs. We focus on a decision support tool, AEO Digiscan, developed to assist companies with an AEO self-assessment. We compared the mental models of customs officials, with mental models of the developers of the tool. The results highlight important differences in the interpretation of the new regulations, which will lead to adaptations of the tool