Recent Trends in Discourse and Dialogue

338 Pages·2.082 MB·English

by  Dybkjaer L., Minker W. (eds.)

Recent Trends in Discourse and Dialogue
Text, Speech and Language Technology
VOLUME 39
Series Editors
Nancy Ide, Vassar College, New York, USA
Jean Véronis, Université de Provence and CNRS, France
Editorial Board
Harald Baayen, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands
Kenneth W. Church, AT& TBell Labs, New Jersey, USA
Judith Klavans, Columbia University, New York, USA
David T. Barnard, University of Regina, Canada
Dan Tufis, Romanian Academy of Sciences, Romania
Joaquim Llisterri, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain
Stig Johansson, University of Oslo, Norway
Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, France
The titles published in this series are listed on www.springer.com.
Recent Trends
in Discourse and Dialogue
Edited by
Laila Dybkjær
Natural Interactive Systems Laboratory
BrØ ndby
Denmark
Wolfgang Minker
Institute of Information Technology
University of Ulm
Germany
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008920669
ISBN 97 8-1-4020-6820-1 (HB)
ISBN 978-1-4020-6821-8 (e-book)
Published by Springer,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AADordrecht, The Netherlands.
www.springer.com
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
(cid:1)c 2008SpringerScience+BusinessMediaB.V.
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmittedin any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise,
without writte n permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied
specifically for the purpose of being enteredand executed on a computer system, for exclusive
use by the purchaser of the work.
Contents
Preface ix
Contributing Authors xi
Trends and Challenges in Discourse and Dialogue xvii
Laila Dybkjær and Wolfgang Minker
1. Trends and Challenges xviii
2. Overview of the Individual Chapters xxiii
3. Readership xxx
1
Where Do We Go From Here? 1
Roberto Pieraccini and Juan M. Huerta
1. Introduction: Overview of Dialogue Systems 1
2. VUI Completeness 5
3. Dialogue Management 7
4. Reference Architectures: Research and Commercial 7
5. Programmatic Dialogue Management 11
6. Finite State Control Management 12
7. Inference-Based Dialogue Managers 17
8. Current Industrial Trends 19
9. Conclusions 20
References 22
2
Designing Speech-Controlled Media File Selection 25
for Automotive Systems
Yu-Fang H. Wang and Stefan W. Hamerich
1. Introduction 25
2. Related Work 26
3. Speech Dialogue Systems for Cars 26
4. Automotive Dialogue Design 30
5. Overall System Description 32
6. MP3 Dialogue Design 33
7. Some Notes on MP3 Tags 39
8. Conclusion and Future Work 41
References 41
v
vi RECENT TRENDS IN DISCOURSE AND DIALOGUE
3
A Virtual Human Dialogue Model for Non-Team Interaction 45
David Traum, William Swartout, Jonathan Gratch and Stacy Marsella
1. Introduction 45
2. Dialogue Model 48
3. Dialogue Processing 52
4. Non-Team Negotiation 54
5. Example Interactions 61
6. Preliminary Evaluation and Future Directions 64
References 65
4
Evaluating Interactions with Spoken Dialogue Telephone Services 69
Sebastian M¨oller
1. Introduction 69
2. Subjective Evaluation of Dialogue Services 71
3. Multidimensional Analysis of Subjective Quality Judgements 73
4. Characteristics of Interaction Parameters 76
5. Review of Interaction Parameters 77
6. Initial Evaluation of Interaction Parameters 82
7. Conclusions 85
References 86
Appendix: Definition of Interaction Parameters 91
5
Handling Miscommunication: Why Bother? 101
Michael McTear
1. Introduction 101
2. Defining Miscommunication 102
3. Approaches to Miscommunication in Other Disciplines 104
4. CurrentApproachestoMiscommunicationinSpokenDialogue
Systems 109
5. Handling Miscommunication: Why Bother and What to Do 114
6. Conclusions 118
References 118
6
Sorry, I Didn’t Catch That! 123
Dan Bohus and Alexander I. Rudnicky
1. Introduction 123
2. Experiment and Corpus 126
3. Sources of Understanding Errors 129
4. Impact of Non-Understandings on Dialogue Performance 133
5. Performance of Non-Understanding Recovery Strategies 136
6. User Responses to Non-Understanding Recovery Strategies 138
7. The Effect of Recovery Policy on Performance:
Wizard versus Uninformed 141
8. Towards Learning a Recovery Policy 147
9. Conclusion 150
References 152
Contents vii
7
GALATEA:ADiscourseModellerSupportingConcept-LevelError 155
Handling in Spoken Dialogue Systems
Gabriel Skantze
1. Introduction 155
2. Error Handling in Dialogue Systems 158
3. The Higgins Spoken Dialogue System 163
4. Galatea: The Discourse Modeller 167
5. Error Handling in Higgins 172
6. Evaluation 175
7. Conclusions and Future Work 182
References 184
Appendix 188
8
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes with Continuous 191
Observations for Dialogue Management
Jason D. Williams, Pascal Poupart and Steve Young
1. Introduction 192
2. Overview of POMDPs 194
3. Casting Dialogue Management as a POMDP 196
4. Comparison with Traditional Approach 202
5. Improving Handcrafted Policies 209
6. Conclusions 215
References 216
9
Does This Answer Your Question? 219
Matthias Denecke and Norihito Yasuda
1. Introduction 219
2. Background 223
3. Corpus 228
4. Representations and Dialogue Management 231
5. Dialogue Management 237
6. Evaluation 241
7. Summary and Future Work 243
References 244
10
Meeting Structure Annotation 247
Alexander Gruenstein, John Niekrasz and Matthew Purver
1. Introduction 247
2. Architecture for Meeting Annotation, Research, and Browsing 249
3. Tools 256
4. Annotation Motivations and Schema 260
5. Analysis of Collected Annotations 264
6. Current and Future Work 270
References 272
viii RECENT TRENDS IN DISCOURSE AND DIALOGUE
11
Analyzing Dependencies between Student Certainness States 275
and Tutor Responses in a Spoken Dialogue Corpus
Kate Forbes-Riley and Diane J. Litman
1. Introduction 276
2. Spoken Tutoring Data and Annotation 277
3. Data Analysis 285
4. Correlations between Dependent Bigrams and Student
Learning 293
5. Related Work 296
6. Conclusions and Current Directions 297
References 300
Appendix: More Examples of Tutor Turns Containing Positive
and Negative Feedback 304
Abbreviations 305
Index 309
Preface
Thisbookeditionhighlightsrecenttrendsandimportantissuesthatstillremain
only partially solved or even unsolved within the broad field of discourse and
dialogue. The field is discussed and illustrated both from an overall spoken
(multimodal)dialoguesystemperspectiveaswellasfromamorecomponent-
related perspective. Issues discussed include, for example, discourse and
dialogue modelling in research versus industrial spoken dialogue systems,
evaluation, miscommunication and error handling, grounding, statistical and
corpus-based approaches to discourse and dialogue modelling, data analysis,
andcorpusannotationandannotationtools.
We believe that jointly this collection of chapters provides a good picture
of how far we are today within discourse and dialogue and of important chal-
lengesahead.Onthisbackgroundwehopethatcomputerscientists,engineers,
andotherswhoworkinthebroadareaofdiscourseanddialogue,nomatterif
fromanacademicorindustrialperspective,maybenefitfromthebookandfind
itusefultotheirownwork.GraduatestudentsandPh.D.studentsfocusingon
topics in discourse and dialogue may also find the book interesting and profit
fromreadingit.
Thisbookeditionisbasedonaselectedsubsetofpapersfromthesuccessful
6thSIGdialWorkshoponDiscourseandDialogueheldinLisbon,Portugal,in
September2005inconjunctionwiththe9thEurospeech(Interspeech)confer-
ence. SIGdial is a special interest group on discourse and dialogue sponsored
jointly by the two parent organisations ACL (Association for Computational
Linguistics)andISCA(InternationalSpeechCommunicationAssociation).
The annual two-day SIGdial workshops normally attract a considerable
amount of papers. The workshop in 2005 attracted 80 submissions which is
the highest submission rate to date for the SIGdial workshop series. Twenty-
eight papers were accepted for the workshop and of these 10 were invited for
publicationinthisbookalongwithapaperbyaninvitedspeaker,i.e.atotalof
11papers.
Allworkshoppaperswereextendedandrevisedbeforetheyweresubmitted
asbookchapters.Eachchapterhassubsequentlybeenreviewedbytwoexternal
reviewersandfurtherimprovedonthebasisoftheircomments.
ix
x RECENT TRENDS IN DISCOURSE AND DIALOGUE
We would like to thank all those who contributed to and helped us in
preparingthebook.Inparticularwewouldliketoexpressourgratitudetothe
followingexternalreviewersfortheirvaluablecommentsandcriticismonthe
submitted drafts of the book chapters: Jan Alexandersson, Niels Ole Bernsen,
Andre´ Berton, Rolf Carlson, Mark Core, Els den Os, Hans Dybkjær, Silke
Goronzy, Joakim Gustafson, Ludwig Hitzenberger, Masato Ishizaki, Lars Bo
Larsen, Esther Levin, Johanna Moore, Tim Paek, Patrick Paroubek, Norbert
Reithinger,LaurentRomary,CandaceSidner,RonnieSmith,MarcSwerts,and
Nick Webb. We are also grateful to colleagues at the Institute of Information
Technology in Ulm and at NISLab in Odense for their support in editing the
book.
LailaDYBKJÆR
WolfgangMINKER