In this paper we present an approach to complement speech dialogue applications written in VoiceXML with reasoning capabilities simplifying the integration of domain knowledge into the traditionally coded dialogue flow. One of the characteristic enhancements of our approach is the use of a dedicated reasoning component for processing the knowledge items acquired during the dialogue. The approac...

In some dialogue systems, the design of dialogue strategy is bound tightly to the domain by straightforwardly hard-coding the response actions into the system. Such a paradigm is quite easy to build up a prototype system, but makes it difficult to port the system across different domains. This paper presents a domain-transparent design of dialogue management to increase system portability. The ...

This study investigated the effect of oral dialogue journals on communicative competence of Iranian EFL learners. Participants of this study were 80 students of two Payam-e-Noor Universities who were proved to be homogenous in the communicative competence based on TSE (Test of Spoken English) interview. The participants of one of these universities were considered as the experimental group. The...

In a CALL-environment (Computerassisted language learning) programs should ideally allow the learner to train his/her communicative competence, which is one of the main goals of foreign language teaching nowadays. This can be reached by allowing learners to use and train their knowledge of a foreign language in realistic dialogue-style exercises. All levels of linguistic and communicational ana...

Dialogue management is the component of a dialogue system that determines the optimal action for the system to take at each turn. An important consideration for dialogue managers is the ability to adapt to new user behaviors unseen during training. In this paper, we investigate policy gradient based methods for interactive reinforcement learning where the agent receives action-specific feedback...

The main problem when going from taskoriented dialogue systems to interactive restricted-domain question answering systems is that the lack of task structure prohibits making simplifying assumptions as in task-oriented dialogue systems. In order to address this issue, we propose a solution that combines representations based on keywords extracted from the user utterances with machine learning t...

Conversational Game Theory represents a thread of extant research work which embodies an intuitive picture of dialogue including ideas from both plan-based rational agency and dialogue grammars. Defining the combination of these two ideas is potentially one of its most attractive features. The theory has remained a somewhat abstract architecture however with various degrees of freedom. This pap...

Previous research suggests that multimodal dialogue systems providing both speech and pen input, and outputting a combination of spoken language and graphics, are more robust than unimodal systems based on speech or graphics alone (Andr ́e, 2002; Oviatt, 1999). Such systems are complex to build and signifi cant research and evaluation effort must typically be expended to generate well-tuned modu...

We present the dialogue module of the speech-to-speech translation system VERBMOBIL. We follow the approach that the solution to dialogue processing in a mediating scenario can not depend on a single constrained processing tool, but on a combination of several simple, efficient, and robust components. We show how our solution to dialogue processing works when applied to real data, and give some...

Laurillard sees dialogue as a crucial component of learning and she states that it is almost impossible to achieve in lectures. This paper identifies eight impediments to dialogue in lectures, and shows how they are or can be overcome by (a) adjusting the activities that take place within lectures, (b) using existing Group Response Systems (GRSs), and (c) using extensions to GRSs proposed in th...