Undoubtedly, Ralph H. Johnson and J. Anthony Blair are two of the patriarchs of informal logic (IL), and they remain its most recognized exponents. The informal logic movement initially began as a rejection of the tools of formal logic as an effective means of analysing and evaluating everyday reasoning and argumentation. As it developed, IL began to adopt a dialectical conception of its subjec...

From rule-based to data-driven lexical entrainment models in spoken dialog systems José Lopes a,b,∗, Maxine Eskenazi c, Isabel Trancoso a,b a Spoken Language Laboratory, INESC-ID Lisboa, Rua Alves Redol 9, 1000-029 Lisboa, Portugal b Instituto Superior Técnico, Avenida Rovisco Pais 1, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal c Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pi...

We present a formalism for specifying verbal and non-verbal output from a multi-modal dialogue system. The output specification is XML-based and provides information about communicative functions of the output, without detailing the realisation of these functions. The aim is to let dialogue systems generate the same output for a wide variety of output devices and modalities. The formalism was d...

We have studied estimation of dialog system users’ internal state before the input utterance. In a practical use of a dialogue-based system, a user is often perplexed with the prompt. An ordinary system provides more detailed information to the user taking time to input, but the help is meddlesome for the user considering the answer to the prompt. To make an appropriate response, the spoken dia...

When using spoken dialog systems in actual environments, users sometimes abandon the dialog without making any input utterance. To help these users before they give up, the system should know why they could not make an utterance. Thus, we have examined a method to estimate the state of a dialog user by capturing the user’s non-verbal behavior even when the user’s utterance is not observed. The ...

The communication with robotic assistants or companions is a challenging new domain for the use of dialog systems. In contrast to classical spoken language interfaces users interact with mobile robots mostly in a multi-modal way. In this paper we will present the integration of several modalities in the dialog system of BIRON – the Bielefeld Robot Companion. Besides speech as the main modality ...

This paper contains an analysis of caller response timing patterns in spoken dialog systems. The findings presented here are based on data from live commercial dialog systems. It is shown that caller responses after a system finished playing the prompt resemble a uni-modal distribution and can be modeled with a rational distribution function. This finding allows understanding when callers tend ...

In this paper, we introduce a new approach to automatic emotion detection in blog posts. The purpose of our research is to develop an effective tool for recognition and interpretation of affect conveyed through written language. The main idea behind the proposed rule-based algorithm is to determine the prevailing emotion in each sentence of diary-like entry and to display the dynamics of emotio...

The development of Dialog-Based ComputerAssisted Language Learning (DB-CALL) systems requires research on the simulation of language learners. This paper presents a new method for generation of grammar errors, an important part of the language learner simulator. Realistic errors are generated via Markov Logic, which provides an effective way to merge a statistical approach with expert knowledge...

This paper describes the SmartKom-Home system realized within the SmartKom project. It assists the user by means of a multi-modal dialogue system in the home environment. This involves the control of various devices and the access to services. SmartKom-Home is supposed to serve as a uniform interface to all these devices and services so the user is freed from the necessity to understand which o...