We are investigating techniques for supporting autonomous dialogue in interactive story telling. That is, instead of writing a script for every possible sequence of events, we would like to develop an approach in which story characters have more autonomy in deciding what to say when. We describe our current research on applying dialogue games theory to interactive story telling. We illustrate t...

This paper shows how we can combine the art of grammar writing with the power of statistics by bootstrapping statistical language models (SLMs) for Dialogue Systems from grammars written using the Grammatical Framework (GF) (Ranta, 2004). Furthermore, to take into account that the probability of a user’s dialogue moves is not static during a dialogue we show how the same methodology can be used...

In earlier issues, the Journal of Basic Writing has carried an exchange about adult socio-cognitive development and college students' writing. To date, this colloquy has included Myra Kogen's "The Conventions of Expository Writing," my (Hays) reply to that article, and Joseph and Nancy Martinez's response to both papers. Whether or not such dialogue changes any minds, it forces us to question, ...

We report on a method for utilising corpora collected in natural settings. It is based on distilling (re-writing) natural dialogues to elicit the type of dialogue that would occur if one the dialogue participants was a computer instead of a human. The method is a complement to other means such asWizard of Oz-studies and un-distilled natural dialogues. We present the distilling method and guidel...

This article explores how dialogue journals can lead to a transformative learning experience. Adult Latino students enrolled in a community college developmental reading class agree to speak truth to power through this critical writing process. Using Mezirow’s(2002) transformational learning theory, Brookfield’s (2000) concepts on teaching for critical thinking, and Cranton’s (2000) ideas of in...