Natural Language Processing
University of Melbourne, 10-14 July 2006
|
|
Natural Language Processing University of Melbourne, 10-14 July 2006 |
|
Approaches to Dialogue Systems and Dialogue Management. This talk will present an overview of some of the most popular approaches to dialogue system organization. We will briefly survey some prominent dialogue domains and systems to engage in dialogue within those domains. We will go over the different functional components of a dialogue system and some different approaches to provide that functionality. Finally, we will focus on the dialogue management component, and discuss different techniques for dialogue manager, including keyword, IR-inspired techniques, finite state systems, frame based, plan- and agent-based, and information-state based methods.
Aspects of Information State for Dialogue with Virtual Humans. This talk will look in-depth at some aspects of the dialogue manager for a set of Virtual Humans at the Institute for Creative Technologies. Virtual Humans are AI agents with humanoid bodies in a virtual reality setting, who interact with people and a virtual world. These agents are used primarily in training prototypes, where they must play the role of a character in a scenario. We will go over the approach to organizing information state, the broad processing algorithms, and focus in detail on several aspects, including turn-taking, grounding, social obligations management, and negotiation.
Dr. David Traum is a Research Scientist at ICT and a research assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Rochester in 1994. His research focuses on collaboration and dialogue communication between agents, including both human and artificial agents. Of primary interest is the interaction between the individual cognitive functioning and the social fabric, and the relationship between task-related and communicative actions. He has engaged in theoretical, implementational, and empirical approaches to the problem, studying human-human natural language and multi-modal dialogue, as well as building a number of dialogue systems to communicate with human users. These systems have ranged in complexity from simple command and control and system-directed information-providing systems to full mixed-initiative collaborative planning and interaction, and have included both uni-modal (text or speech) and multimodal (gesture, sketching, pointing) systems and embodied conversational agents. Dr. Traum is author of over 100 technical articles, has served on many conference program committees, and is currently the president of SIGDIAL, the international special interest group in discourse and dialogue.