Abstract
In natural language dialogue, contributions from the participants are generally multifunctional, that is, in a single contribution a speaker addresses multiple aspects of communication simultaneously. A speaker can directly address the underlying task or activity, such as asking a question about the domain, while at the same time giving feedback about his understanding of the dialogue partner’s previous utterance. This phenomenon can be captured elegantly in terms of dialogue acts that are organised in a multidimensional taxonomy. Most stateof- the-art dialogue systems contain a dialogue manager, which takes care of deciding which action to take next in the dialogue, given some form of information state or context model that is monitored and updated during the dialogue. In this chapter a new approach to dialogue management is described, in which the multidimensional nature of communication is supported. A dialogue manager that generates dialogue acts from several dimensions simultaneously allows for a less rigid system behaviour and for more natural interactions with users. As a showcase, the implementation of such a dialogue manager is described, as well as its embedding in the IMIX interactive question answering system.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Op den Akker R, Bunt H, Keizer S, van Schooten B (2005) From question answering to spoken dialogue: Towards an information search assistant for interactive multimodal information extraction. In: Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, Interspeech 2005, pp 2793–2796
Allen J, Core M (1997) DAMSL: Dialogue Act Markup in Several Layers (Draft 2.1). Technical Report. University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
Allwood J (2000) An activity-based approach to pragmatics. In: Bunt H, Black W (eds) Abduction, Belief and Context in Dialogue, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 47–81
Bunt H (1989) Information dialogues as communicative action in relation to partner modelling and information processing. In: Taylor M, N´eel F, Bouwhuis D (eds) The structure of multimodal dialogue, North-Holland, Amsterdam, pp 47–74
Bunt H (1995) DIT – Dynamic interpretation and dialogue theory. In: Taylor M, N´eel F, Bouwhuis D (eds) The structure of multimodal dialogue, Volume 2, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 139–166
Bunt H (2000) Dialogue pragmatics and context modelling. In: Bunt H, Black W (eds) Abduction, Belief, and Context in Dialogue, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 81–150
Bunt H (2009a) A framework for dialogue act specification. In: Heylen D, Pelachaud C, Catizone R, Traum D (eds) Proceedings of EDAML–AAMAS Workshop “Towards a Standard Markup Language for Embodied Dialogue Acts”, Budapest, pp 36–36
Bunt H (2009b) Multifunctionality and muldimensional dialogue semantics. In: Proceedings of DiaHolmia, 13th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Stockholm, pp 3–14
Bunt H (2009c) Semantic annotations as complementary to underspecified semantic representations. In: Proceedings of IWCS-8, the 8th International Workshop on computational Semantics, Tilburg, pp 33–44
Bunt H (2010a) Multifunctionality in dialogue and its interpretation. Computer Speech and Language, Special issue on dialogue modeling, Y Wilks, editor
Bunt H (2010b) Multifunctionality in dialogue and its interpretation. In: Toward Autonomous, Adaptive, and Context-Aware Multimedia IInterfaces, Anna Esposito, editor, Berlin: Springer
Bunt H, Keizer S (2005) Dialogue semantics links annotation to context representation. In: In Joint TALK/AMI Workshop on Standards for Multimodal Dialogue Context, Edinburgh, URL http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/olemon/standcon-SOI.html
Bunt H, Morante R, Keizer S (2007) An empirically based computational model of grounding in dialogue. In: Proceedings of the 8th SIGdialWorkshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Antwerp, Belgium, pp 283–290
Bunt H, Alexandersson J, Carletta J, Choe JW, Fang A, Hasida K, Lee K, Petukhova V, Popescu-Belis A, Romary L, Soria C, Traum D (2010) Towards an ISO standard for dialogue act formal annotation. In: Proceedings 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2010), Malta, Paris: ELRA
Ginzburg J (1997) Resolving Questions I & II. Linguistics and Philosophy 17; 18
Grice H (1975) Logic and conversation. In: Cole P, Morgan J (eds) Syntax and Semantics, Vol.3: Speech Acts, Academic Press, New York, pp 43–58
Keizer S, Bunt H (2006) Multidimensional dialogue management. In: Proceedings of the SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Sydney, Australia, pp 37– 45
Keizer S, Bunt H (2007) Evaluating combinations of dialogue acts for generation. In: Proceedings of the SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Antwerp, Belgium, pp 158–165
Keizer S, Morante R (2006) Context specification and update mechanisms for dialogue management. In: Proceedings of the 18th BeNeLux Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC’06), Namur, Belgium, pp 181–188
Larsson S (1998) Questions Under Discussion and Dialogue Moves. In: Proceedings of the Twente Workshop on the Formal Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Twente, pp 209–247
Petukhova V, Bunt H (2009a) Dimensions in communication, URL http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/faculties/humanities/ticc/research/technicalreports/, TiCC Technical Report TR 2009 002, Tilburg University
Petukhova V, Bunt H (2009b) The independence of dimensions in multidimensional dialogue act annotation. In: Proceedings NAACL HLT Conference, Boulder, Colorado
Petukhova V, Bunt H (2010) introducing communicative function qualifiers. In: Proceedings Second International Conference on Global Interoperability for Language resources (ICGL-2), Hong Kong, pp 123–131
Poesio M, Traum D (1997) Conversational Actions and Discourse Situations. Computational Intelligence 13 (3):309–347
Poesio M, Traum D (1998) Towards an Axiomatization of Dialogue Acts. In: Proceedings of the Twente Workshop on the Formal Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Twente, pp 309–347
Stent A (2002) A conversation acts model for generating spoken dialogue contributions. Computer Speech and Language, Special Issue on Spoken Language Generation 16(3–4):313–352
Traum D, Larsson S (2003) The information state approach to dialogue management. In: van Kuppevelt J, Smith R (eds) Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialogue, Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp 325–354
Turunen M, Hakulinen J, R¨aih¨a KJ, Salonen EP, Kainulainen A, Prusi P (2005) An architecture and applications for speech-based accessibility systems. IBM Systems Journal 44(3):485–504
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Keizer, S., Bunt, H., Petukhova, V. (2011). Multidimensional Dialogue Management. In: van den Bosch, A., Bouma, G. (eds) Interactive Multi-modal Question-Answering. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17525-1_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17525-1_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-17524-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-17525-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)