Spoken Dialogue Systems ask for clarification when they think they have misunderstood users. Such requests may differ depending on the information the system believes it needs to clarify. However, when the error type or location is misidentified, clarification requests appear confusing or inappropriate. We describe a classifier that identifies inappropriate requests, trained on features extract...

Concept Maps are used as a tool of the constructivist theory of Meaningful Learning. Just like domain ontologies, concept maps enable clarification of concepts and relationships of a domain. This article presents a learning assessment model supported by the use of concept maps and ontology alignment techniques, respectively for clarification of the organization of concepts in the student's cogn...

The paper investigates an elliptical construction, Clarification Ellipsis, that occurs in dialogue. We suggest that this provides data that demonstrates that updates resulting from utterances cannot be defined in purely semantic terms, contrary to the prevailing assumptions of existing approaches to dynamic semantics. We offer a computationally oriented analysis of the resolution of ellipsis in...

TREC 2005 saw the third year of the High Accuracy Retrieval from Documents (HARD) track. The HARD track explores methods for improving the accuracy of document retrieval systems, with particular attention paid to the start of the ranked list. Although it has done so in a few different ways in the past, budget realities limited the track to “clarification forms” this year. The question investiga...

To determine the effect of residual enzyme activity on carrot juice cloud, 0 to 1 U/g pectin methylesterase (PME) was added to pasteurized carrot juice. Cloud stability and particle diameters were measured to quantify juice cloud stability and clarification for 56 days of storage. All levels of PME addition resulted in clarification; higher amounts had a modest effect in causing more rapid clar...

In the experiment described in this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of a document-independent technique for eliciting additional information from searchers about their information problems. We propose that such a technique can be used to elicit terms for use in query expansion and as a follow-up when ambiguous queries are initially posed by searchers. We use a clarification form to obta...

One of the promising approaches to analyzing taskoriented dialogues has involved modeling the plans of the speakers in the task domain. In general, these models work well as long as the topic follows the task structure closely, but they have difficulty in accounting for clarification subdialogues and topic change. We have developed a model based on a hierarchy of plans and metaplans that accoun...

As part of our ongoing work on grounding in dialogue, we present a corpus-based investigation of intention-level clarification requests. We propose to refine existing theories of grounding by considering two distinct types of intention-related conversational problems: intention recognition and intention adoption. This distinction is backed-up by an annotation experiment conducted on a corpus as...

This paper presents a cooperative consultation system on a restricted domain. The system builds hypotheses on the user's plan and avoids misunderstandings (with consequent repair dialogues) through clarification dialogues in case of ambiguity. The role played by constraints in the generation of the answer is characterized in order to limit the cases of ambiguities requiring a clarification dial...

2. Can highly focused interaction with the searcher be used to improve the accuracy of a system? Participants created “clarification forms” generated in response to a query—and leveraging any information available in the corpus—and were filled out by the searcher. Typical clarification questions might ask whether some titles seem relevant, whether some words or names are on topic, or whether a ...