Students from all areas of cognitive studies are welcome. The course can be taken S/U or Audit only.
We will meet on Monday, the 7th, the topic being "What I did this summer" -- everyone will have the opportunity to take 5-10 minutes to present what they worked on this summer. Note: there is currently no overhead projector in that room, so be prepared to give a whiteboard presentation.
As agreed today, we'll move the NLP seminar to Wednesdays at 4:30, alternating weeks with the AI seminar. I'll reserve a conference room for us. Our next meeting will be Wednesday, the 16th; we'll read a paper (to be determined) of Sandra Carberry's, who'll be visiting on Friday, the 18th.
This week's AI and NLP seminars will be held jointly since we have an outside speaker of interest to both groups. In addition, the seminar will be held FRIDAY (2-3pm) rather than Wednesday. Sandra Carberry is a Cornell Alum and is a senior researcher in Natural Language Processing. We look forward to seeing you on FRIDAY.
For a number of years, our Dialogue Research Group at the University of Delaware has been investigating strategies for participating in collaborative consultation dialogues in which user and system work together to construct a plan for achieving some domain goal. Work on this project includes:
[1] dialogue/user/task modeling: incremental recognition of user plans, goals, and preferences, default inferences in dynamic task modeling, recognition of complex discourse acts, and modeling of negotiation subdialogues
[2] adaptive system behavior: reasoning on a user/task model to facilitate robust understanding and to generate responses tailored to the individual user and situation
[3] collaborative response generation: formulation of a plan-based model for generating cooperative responses.
In this talk, I will first present an overview of our work on dialogue modeling. Our tripartite model and processing strategy have a number of advantages over previous approaches, including 1) providing a better representation of user intentions than previous models, 2) allowing the nuances of different kinds of actions and processing to be captured at each level (domain, problem-solving, and communicative), 3) enabling the recognition of complex communicative acts (such as expressing doubt) and the beliefs underlying such actions, and 4) providing for the incremental recognition of communicative acts that cannot be recognized from a single utterance alone. Then I will outline our architecture for response generation that allows the system to initiate subdialogues to negotiate proposed additions to the shared plan and to provide support for its claims. The response generation component captures cooperative responses within the collaborative framework and accounts for why questions are sometimes never answered. Finally, I will discuss the direction of our current research, including the use of Transformation-Based Learning to recognize dialogue acts and the inclusion of gestural evidence into the recognition algorithm.
This work represents a collaborative effort with several researchers: Jennifer Chu-Carroll, Lynn Lambert, Ken Samuel, Leah Schroeder, and K. Vijay-Shanker.
Kiri Wagstaff will present Exploiting Syntactic Structure for Language Modeling, by Ciprian Chelba and Frederick Jelinek, appearing in this year's COLING-ACL. My understanding is that it is the first paper presenting a syntactic model that beats trigrams at language modeling.
Erwin Chan will be presenting Separating Surface Order and Syntactic Relations in a Dependency Grammar, by Norbert Broeker, appearing in this year's COLING/ACL.
Randolph Chung will be presenting Applying Explanation-based Learning to Control and Speeding-up Natural Language Generation, by Guenter Neumann, Proc. of ACL-EACL 1997, Madrid, Spain, pp. 214-221.
Mark Andrews will be presenting Word Clustering and Disambiguation Based on Co-occurrence Data, by Hang Li and Naoke Abe, appearing in COLING-ACL'98.
The last meeting of CS775 will be Wednesday, December 2. Tom Chi will be presenting Identifying Discourse Markers in Spoken Dialog, by Peter A. Heeman, Donna Byron, and James F. Allen, appearing in the AAAI '98 Spring Symposium on Applying Machine Learning to Discourse Processing.
The 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING'98) and the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'98).
35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Second Conference On Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.