Crowd-sourced collection of task-oriented human-human dialogues in a multi-domain scenario

There is a lack of high-quality corpora for the purposes of trainingtask-oriented, end-to-end dialogue systems. This paper describes a dialogue col-lection process which used crowd-sourcing and a Wizard-of-Oz set-up to collectwritten human-human dialogues for a task-oriented, multi-domain scenario. Thecontext is a tourism agency, where users try to select the more desired hotel,restaurant, museum or shop. To respond to users, wizards were assisted by an ex-ploratory system supporting Preference-enriched Faceted Search. An importantaspect was the translation of user intent to a number of actions (hard or soft-constraints) by wizards. The main goal was to collect dialogues as realistic aspossible between a user and an operator, suitable for training end-to-end dialoguesystems. This work describes the experiences made, the options and the deci-sions taken to minimize the human effort and budget, along with the tools usedand developed, and describes in detail the resulting dialogue collection

Automating Logical Preservation for Small Institutions with Hoppla

Abstract. Preserving digital information over the long term becomes increasing important for large number of institutions. The required expertise and limited tool support discourage especially small institutions from operating archives with digital preservation capabilities. Hoppla is an archiving solution that combines back-up and fully automated migration services for data collections in environments with limited expertise and resources for digital preservation. The system allows user-friendly handling of services and outsources digital preservation expertise. This paper presents the automated logical preservation process of the Hoppla archiving system in detail. It describes the recommendation process for appropriate preservation strategies via a web update service. A set of two real world case studies were conducted based on a first rules set focused on common office documents. The promising results sustain the novel approach of automating logical preservation by outsourcing expertise.

FleXConf: A Flexible Conference Assistant Using Context-Aware Notification Services

Integrating context-aware notification services to ubiquitous computing systems aims at the provision of the right information to the right users, at the right time, in the right place, and on the right device, and constitutes a significant step towards the realization of the Ambient Intelligence vision. In this paper, we present FlexConf, a semantics-based system that supports location-based, personalized notification services for the assistance of conference attendees. Its special features include an ontology-based representation model, rule-based context-aware reasoning, and a novel positioning system for indoor environments