Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Implementing robust Dialogue Systems (DS) supporting natural interaction with humans still presents challenging problems and difficulties. In the centre of any DS is its Dialogue Manager (DM), providing the functionalities which permit a dialogue to move forward towards some common goal in a cooperative interaction. Unfortunately, there are few authoring tools to provide an easy and intuitive implementation of such dialogues. In this paper we present a methodology for dialogue engineering for the MIDIKI DM. This methodology bridges this gap since it is supported by an authoring tool which generates XML and compilable Java representations of a dialogue.

In the present paper, the intonational realization of dialogue acts in Polish map task dialogues is analyzed. The study is focused on the acts realized as single, well-formed intonational phrases. Basic pitch-related parameters are measured and discussed. Nuclear melodies are described and categorized, and some generalizations are formulated about their common realizations. Certain aspects of the grammatical form and phrase placement in the dialogue flow are also taken into account. The results will be employed in comparative studies and in the preparation of glottodidactic materials, but they may also prove useful in the field of speech synthesis or recognition.

We consider that factors such as prosody of systems’ utterances and dialogue rhythm are important to attain a natural human-machine dialogue. However, the relations between dialogue rhythm and speaker’s various states in task-oriented dialogue have been not revealed. In this study, we collected task-oriented dialogues and analyzed the relations between “dialogue structures, kinds of dialogue acts (contents of utterances), (/), and interjection” and “dialogue rhythm (response timing, F0, and speech rate)”.

Since the design and acquisition of a new dialog corpus is a complex task, new methods to facilitate this task are necessary. In this paper, we present a methodology to make use of our previous work within the framework of dialog systems in order to acquire a dialog corpus for a new domain. The main idea is the simulation of recognition and understanding errors in the acquisition of the new dialog corpus. This simulation is based on the analysis of such errors in a previously acquired corpus and the definition of a correspondence table among the concepts and attributes of both tasks. This correspondence table is based on the similarity of semantic meaning and frequencies. Finally, the application of this methodology is illustrated in some examples.

Information Retrieval (IR) applications require appropriate Multimodal Resources to develop all of their components. The work described in this paper is one of the main steps of a broader project that consists in developing a Multimodal Index System for Information Retrieval. The final goal of this part of the project is to create a robust Automatic Speech Recognition System for Basque that also covers the other languages spoken in the Basque Country: Spanish and French. It is widely accepted that the robustness of these systems is directly related to the quality of the resources used during training. Hence, the digital resources for Multilingual Continuous Speech Recognition systems for the three official languages in the Basque Country have to be described.

In this paper we discuss the phenomenon of grounding in dialogue using a context-change approach to the interpretation of dialogue utterances. We formulate an empirically motivated principle for the strengthening of weak mutual beliefs, and show that with this principle, the building of common ground in dialogue can be explained through ordinary mechanisms of understanding and cooperation.

If a dialog system can respond to a user as naturally as a human, the interaction will be smoother. In this research, we aim to develop a dialog system by emulating the human behavior in a chat-like dialog. In this paper, we developed a dialog system which could generate chat-like responses and their timing using a decision tree. The system could perform “collaborative completion,” “” (back-channel) and so on. The decision tree utilized the pitch and the power contours of user’s utterance, recognition hypotheses, and response preparation status of the response generator, at every time segment as features to generate response timing.

This article describes the development and automatic processing of the audio-visual DIALOG corpus. The DIALOG corpus is a prosodically annotated corpus of Czech television debates that has been recorded and annotated at the Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It has recently grown to more than 400 VHS 4-hour tapes and 375 transcribed TV debates. The described digitisation process and automatic alignment enable an easily accessible and user-friendly research environment, supporting the exploration of Czech prosody and its analysis and modelling. This project has been carried out in cooperation with the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics of Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague. Currently the first version of the DIALOG corpus is available to the public (version 0.1, ). It includes 10 selected and revised hour-long talk shows.

Setting layout of a two-dimensional domain is one of the key tasks of our ongoing project aiming at a dialogue system which should give the blind the opportunity to create web pages and graphics by means of dialogue. We present an approach that enables active dialogue strategies in natural language. This approach is based on a procedure that checks the correctness of the given task, analyses the user’s requirements and proposes a consistent solution. An example illustrating the approach is presented.

One major problem in multilingual Question Answering (QA) is the combination of answers obtained from different languages into one single ranked list. This paper proposes a new method for tackling this problem. This method is founded on a graph-based ranking approach inspired in the popular Google’s PageRank algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other current techniques for answer fusion, and also evidence the advantages of multilingual QA over the traditional monolingual approach.