In the present paper, we describe a theoretical approach to the interpretation of utterances in spoken language dialogue systems. The paper presents a decidable version of Discourse Representation Theory based on Description Logics. It shows how terminological reasoning can be integrated into parsing, while reasoning about the extensional meaning of utterances serves for realizing mixed-initiat...

In this paper, a multi-modal data collection tool called MICoT is described. We highlight the various design and implementation aspects that we consider to be important for MICoT. An example is given to illustrate the application of the tool to collect data for our research in multi-modal dialog system.

Cooperativity is usually seen as a central concept in the pragmatics of dialogue. There are a number of accounts of dialogue performance and interpretation that require some notion of cooperation or collaboration as part of the explanatory mechanism of communication. For instance, Grice’s cooperativity principle and associated maxims are used to explain conversational implicature (Grice, 1975)....

In this paper we present the communication architecture of the DALI Logic Programming Agent-Oriented language and we discuss its semantics. We have designed a meta-level where the user can specify, via the distinguished tell/told primitives, constraints on communication or even a new protocol. Moreover, the user can define meta-rules for filtering and/or understanding messages via applying onto...

This paper introduces a new dialogue management framework for goal-directed conversations. A declarative specification defines the domain-specific elements and guides the dialogue manager, which communicates with the knowledge sources to complete the specified goal. The user is viewed as another knowledge source. The dialogue manager finds the next action by a mixture of rule-based reasoning an...

Head pose and gesture offer several key conversational grounding cues and are used extensively in face-to-face interaction among people. We investigate how dialog context from an embodied conversational agent (ECA) can improve visual recognition of user gestures. We present a recognition framework which (1) extracts contextual features from an ECA’s dialog manager, (2) computes a prediction of ...

Semantic processing is vital in a dialogue system for the language understanding stage. Recent approaches of semantic processing rely on machine learning methods to perform the task. These are more robust to errors from the speech recogniser. Although these approaches are built on the domain of the dialogue system they do not incorporate contextual information available in the dialogue system. ...

Even if only the acoustic channel is considered, human communication is highly multi-modal. Non-lexical cues provide a variety of information such as emotion or agreement. The ability to process such cues is highly relevant for spoken dialog systems, especially in assistance systems. In this paper, we focus on the recognition of non-lexical confirmations such as ”mhm”, as they enhance the syste...

In recent years, spoken dialog systems have been exploited by many researchers, but it is still too early to apply it for practical use in commercial fields. In addition to the inaccuracy of each component of dialog systems including automatic speech recognizer (ASR), spoken language understanding (SLU), and dialog management (DM), the inconvenience and the high cost of maintaining and upgradin...