The Metalogue project aims to develop a multi-modal, multi-party dialogue system with metacognitive abilities that will advance our understanding of natural conversational human-machine interaction and dialogue interfaces. This paper introduces the vision for the system and discusses its application in the context of debate skills training where it has the potential to provide learners with a r...

This paper describes how a concept lattice that represents semantic relations (synonymy, hyponymy, hypernymy) in a set of words can be used for semantic matching. This kind of concept lattice is the result of the formal concept analysis technique used for determining semantic relations in a set of words extracted from a monolingual dictionary. It is shown how relations between concepts can be m...

In this paper, we present a technique for learning new dialog strategies by using a statistical dialog manager that is trained from a dialog corpus. A dialog simulation technique has been developed to acquire data required to train the dialog model and then explore new dialog strategies. A set of measures has also been defined to evaluate the dialog strategy that is automatically learned. We ha...

Dialog boxes are used in graphical user interfaces to display a few possible options based on a typical scenario. The dialog boxes are useful in case of displaying warnings, errors, confirmations etc. in special situations. A typical dialog box is displayed in a small window with some text message along with a few options for the user to select. A dialog box might display the attributes of an o...

Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) is the study of how to reason about knowledge, belief, and communication. This paper studies the relative expressivity of certain fragments of the DEL language for public and private communication. It is shown that the language of public communication with common knowledge and the language of private communication with common knowledge are expressively incomparable...

Spoken dialog systems help users achieve a task using natural language. Noisy speech recognition and ambiguity in natural language motivate statistical approaches that model distributions over the user’s goal at every step in the dialog. The task of tracking these distributions, termed Dialog State Tracking, is therefore an essential component of any spoken dialog system. In recent years, the D...

One of the crucial components of dialog system is the dialog state tracker, which infers user’s intention from preliminary speech processing. Since the overall performance of the dialog system is heavily affected by that of the dialog tracker, it has been one of the core areas of research on dialog systems. In this paper, we present a dialog state tracker that combines a generative probabilisti...

Statistical approaches to dialog state tracking synthesize information across multiple turns in the dialog, overcoming some speech recognition errors. When training a dialog state tracker, there is typically only a small corpus of well-matched dialog data available. However, often there is a large corpus of mis-matched but related data – perhaps pertaining to different semantic concepts, or fro...

This paper addresses our experience in using and developing the VEG (Visual Event Grammars) toolkit for the formal specification, verification, design and implementation of graphical user interfaces. In fact, VEG follows the traditional Seeheim’s model, decomposing a GUI in three parts. The Presentation Part takes into account how the different components of the GUI are depicted and laid out (e...

As web user interfaces become more sophisticated both in functionalities and reactivity, the dialog of such user interfaces is highly interactive and therefore raises the need for abstracting these capabilities into an advanced dialog model that enables modeling such dialogs. To address this need, multi-level dialog modeling enables designers to model a dialog at two inter-related levels of abs...