SIGDIAL

Models of conversation that rely on a robust notion of cooperation don't model dialogues where the agents' goals conflict; for instance, negotiation over restricted resources, courtroom cross examination and political debate. We aim to provide a ...

The Spoken Dialog Challenge 2010 was an exercise to investigate how different spoken dialog systems perform on the same task. The existing Let's Go Pittsburgh Bus Information System was used as a task and four teams provided systems that were first ...

We investigate how to jointly explain the performance and behavioral differences of two spoken dialogue systems. The Join Evaluation and Differences Identification (JEDI), finds differences between systems relevant to performance by formulating the ...

This paper describes a general and effective domain selection framework for multi-domain spoken dialogue systems that employ distributed domain experts. The framework consists of two processes: deciding if the current domain continues and estimating the ...

With the evolution of online communication methods, conversations are increasingly handled via email, internet forums and other such methods. In this paper, we attempt to model lexical information in a context sensitive manner, encoding our belief that ...

We present a dialogue collection and enrichment framework that is designed to explore the learning and evaluation of dialogue policies for simple conversational characters using textual training data. To facilitate learning and evaluation, our framework ...

Human dialogue serves as a valuable model for learning the behavior of dialogue systems. Hidden Markov models' sequential structure is well suited to modeling human dialogue, and their theoretical underpinnings are consistent with the conception of ...

We present a novel scheme of spoken dialogue systems which uses the up-to-date information on the web. The scheme is based on information extraction which is defined by the predicate-argument (P-A) structure and realized by semantic parsing. Based on ...

Successful communication would seem to require that speakers and listeners distinguish between their own knowledge, commitments and intentions, and those of their interlocutors. A particularly important distinction is between shared knowledge (common ...

Instruction giving can be used in several applications, ranging from trainers in simulated worlds to non player characters for virtual games. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for rapidly prototyping virtual instruction-giving agents from human-...

Natural language generators are faced with a multitude of different decisions during their generation process. We address the joint optimisation of navigation strategies and referring expressions in a situated setting with respect to task success and ...

Although not very well investigated, a crucial aspect of gesture use in dialogues is to regulate the organisation of the interaction. People use gestures decisively, for example to indicate that they want someone to take the turn, to 'brush away' what ...

We report on an empirical study of a multiparty turn-taking model for physically situated spoken dialog systems. We present subjective and objective performance measures that show how the model, supported with a basic set of sensory competencies and ...

Conventional speech recognition approaches usually wait until the user has finished talking before returning a recognition hypothesis. This results in spoken dialogue systems that are unable to react while the user is still speaking. Incremental Speech ...

We present the novel task of predicting temporal features of continuations of user input, while that input is still ongoing. We show that the remaining duration of an ongoing word, as well as the duration of the next can be predicted reasonably well, ...

This paper provides a first assessment of a statistical dialog system in public use. In our dialog system there are four main recognition tasks, or slots -- bus route names, bus-stop locations, dates, and times. Whereas a conventional system tracks a ...

Generating Temporal Expressions (TE) that are easy to understand, unambiguous, and reasonably short is a challenge for humans and Spoken Dialogue Systems. Rather than developing hand-written decision rules, we adopt a data-driven approach by collecting ...

Detecting levels of interest from speakers is a new problem in Spoken Dialog Understanding with significant impact on real world business applications. Previous work has focused on the analysis of traditional acoustic signals and shallow lexical ...

User satisfaction is a common evaluation metric in task-oriented dialogue systems, whereas tutorial dialogue systems are often evaluated in terms of student learning gain. However, user satisfaction is also important for such systems, since it may ...

In this work we describe the modeling and prediction of Interaction Quality (IQ) in Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) using Support Vector Machines. The model can be employed to estimate the quality of the ongoing interaction at arbitrary points in a spoken ...

SMS dictation by voice is becoming a viable alternative providing a convenient method for texting in a variety of environments. Contextual knowledge should be used to improve performance. We propose to add topic knowledge as part of the contextual ...

Many discourse connectives can signal several types of relations between sentences. Their automatic disambiguation, i.e. the labeling of the correct sense of each occurrence, is important for discourse parsing, but could also be helpful to machine ...

We propose a method for modelling how dialogue moves influence and are influenced by the agents' preferences. We extract constraints on preferences and dependencies among them, even when they are expressed indirectly, by exploiting discourse structure. ...

We present a method of evaluating the immediate performance impact of user state misclassifications in spoken dialogue systems. We illustrate the method with a tutoring system that adapts to student uncertainty over and above correctness. First we ...

Instructional efficacy of automated Conversational Agents designed to help small groups of students achieve higher learning outcomes can be improved by the use of social interaction strategies. These strategies help the tutor agent manage the attention ...

Mental modeling is crucial for natural human-robot interactions (HRI). Yet, effective mechanisms that enable reasoning about and communication of mental states are not available. We propose to utilize adverbial cues, routinely employed by humans, for ...

This paper presents a progressively challenging series of experiments that investigate clarification subdialogues to resolve the words in noisy transcriptions of user utterances. We focus on user utterances where the user's specific intent requires ...

This paper addresses a first step toward a spoken dialogue system that evokes user's spontaneous backchannels. We construct an HMM-based dialogue-style text-to-speech (TTS) system that generates human-like cues that evoke users' backchannels. A spoken ...

This paper reports on an experiment that investigates clarification subdialogues in intentionally noisy speech recognition. The architecture learns weights for mixtures of grounding strategies from examples provided by a human wizard embedded in the ...

We present a novel annotation scheme for cross-cultural argumentation and persuasion dialogues. This scheme is an adaptation of existing coding schemes on negotiation, following a review of literature on cross-cultural differences in negotiation styles. ...