SimDialog is a visual editor for dialog in computer games. This paper presents the design of SimDialog, illustrating how script writers and non-programmers can easily create dialog for video games with complex branching structures and dynamic response characteristics. The system creates dialog as a directed graph. This allows for play using the dialog with a statebased cause and effect system t...

This demo presents a multimodal dialog system that uses Hidden Information State (HIS) approach to manage the human-machine multimodal interaction. HIS dialog manager is a variation of classic Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), which provides one of the statistical dialog modeling frameworks. But it has been hard to apply POMDP to the real domain of dialog system since POMDP-...

I felt honored and uncertain when Grzegorsz Rozenberg, the president of EATCS, proposed that I write a continuing column on logic in computer science in this Bulletin. Writing essays wasn’t my favorite subject in high school. After some hesitation, I decided to give it a try. I’ll need all the help I can get from you: criticism, comments, queries, suggestions, etc. Andrei Nikolayevich Kolmogoro...

This article describes the dialog module of EVAR. The dialog is seen as a sequence of dialog acts uttered by the system and the user. From a corpus of real human-human dialogs a model was extracted. The model covers all sequences of dialog acts observed in the corpus. Each dialog act is modelled as a set of pragmatic, semantic and syntactic concepts. The properties of the concepts and the curre...

This paper presents a new approach for dynamically increasing the coverage of a Statistical Dialog Manager. A Stochastic Finite-State Transducer for dialog management is estimated using a dialog simulator. This corpusbased model can cover most typical user behavior; however, sometimes unexpected situations may arise. Whenever these situations occur, the Dialog Manager model has no information t...

SimDialog is a visual editor for dialog in computer games. This paper presents the design of SimDialog, illustrating how script writers and non-programmers can easily create dialog for video games with complex branching structures and dynamic response characteristics. The system creates dialog as a directed graph. This allows for play using the dialog with a statebased cause and effect system t...

In this paper we demonstrate that it is possible to implement certified web systems in a way not much different from writing Standard ML or Haskell code, including use of imperative features like pointers, files, and socket I/O. We present a web-based course gradebook application developed with Ynot, a Coq library for certified imperative programming. We add a dialog-based I/O system to Ynot, a...

One major goal of human computer interfaces is to simplify the communication task. Traditionally, users have been restricted to the language of computers for this task. With the emerging of the graphical and multimodal interfaces the effort required for working with a computer is decreasing. However, the problem of communication is still present, and users continue caring about the communicatio...

The task of dialog management is commonly decomposed into two sequential subtasks: dialog state tracking and dialog policy learning. In an end-to-end dialog system, the aim of dialog state tracking is to accurately estimate the true dialog state from noisy observations produced by the speech recognition and the natural language understanding modules. The state tracking task is primarily meant t...

We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialog acts in conversational speech, i.e., speechact-like units such as Statement, Question, Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and predicts dialog acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as well as on the discourse coherence of the dialog act sequence. The dialog model is based on treating the d...