CLARIE: the Clarication Engine (original) (raw)

CLARIE: Handling Clarification Requests in a Dialogue System

Research on Language and Computation, 2006

This paper sets out a approach to clarification requests (CRs) general enough to cover all the major forms found in corpus data and specific enough to analyse the questions they ask about individual words and phrases. Its main features are a view of utterances as contextual abstracts with a radically abstracted semantic representation, and a view of CRs as standard utterances asking standard questions, but showing a particular kind of contextual dependence. It shows how it can be implemented computationally within a prototype text-based dialogue system, CLARIE, allowing it not only to generate CRs to clarify unknown reference and learn new words, but also to interpret and respond to user CRs, with both capabilities integrated within the standard dialogue processes and governed by empirical evidence.

The Theory and Use of Clarification Requests in Dialogue

2004

Clarification requests are an important, relatively common and yet under-studied dialogue device allowing a user to ask about some feature (e.g. the meaning or form) of an utterance, or part thereof. They can take many different forms (often highly elliptical) and can have many different meanings (requesting various types of information). This thesis combines empirical, theoretical and implementational work to provide a study of the various types of clarification request that exist, give a theoretical analysis thereof, and show how the results can be applied to add useful capabilities to a prototype computational dialogue system.

Processing Unknown Words in a Dialogue System

2002

This paper describes a method of processing unknown words in a HPSGbased dialogue system, with acquisition of lexical semantics via clarification questions answered by the user. Use of a highly contextualized semantic representation, together with an utterance-anaphoric view of clarification, allows the clarificational dialogue to be integrated within the grammar and governed by standard rules of conversation.

Graph-based representations of clarification strategies supporting automatic dialogue management

Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics

This paper aims at presenting a dialogue-oriented approach to the construction of a graph knowledge base (KB) supporting task-oriented human-machine interactions. In particular, we focus on different pragmatic scenarios, facing the Common Ground issue and arguing that knowledge bases (in the form of graphs) are needed to make a clarification and recover pieces of information when inconsistencies occur during the communicative exchange. The main contributions of this work are: 1) a flexible dialog system architecture designed to be plugged into existing service infrastructures, 2) a graph-based knowledge representation protocol to manage both dialog domain and dialog management, 3) a detailed investigation of clarification requests forms with respect to their functions. After a brief introduction (see Section 1), we present: the theoretical underpinnings of the paper and the background work (see Section 2) our system architecture (see Sections 3 and 4) and the clarification requests (CRs) issue (see Section 5); our CRs classification, and some examples in context (see Section 6).

Software-Based Dialogue Systems: Survey, Taxonomy, and Challenges

ACM Computing Surveys

The use of natural language interfaces in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) is undergoing intense study through dedicated scientific and industrial research. The latest contributions in the field, including deep learning approaches like recurrent neural networks (RNNs), the potential of context-aware strategies and user-centred design approaches, have brought back the attention of the community to software-based dialogue systems, generally known as conversational agents or chatbots. Nonetheless, and given the novelty of the field, a generic, context-independent overview of the current state of research on conversational agents covering all research perspectives involved is missing. Motivated by this context, this article reports a survey of the current state of research of conversational agents through a systematic literature review of secondary studies. The conducted research is designed to develop an exhaustive perspective through a clear presentation of the aggregated...

Ontology-driven information-providing dialogue systems

2003

QWURGXFWLRQ As more and more information has been made available in unstructured and semi-structured text formats the demands on support for users to seek and retrieve information have increased. Moving from Information Retrieval (IR) to Information Extraction (IE) and Question Answering (Q&A) gives users vastly improved means to express queries and techniques for processing, retrieving and presenting documents and answers. For example, with today's Q&A-systems a user can state a (factual) question and expect the relevant portion of a text document containing the answer to the question in return.

On the Use of Context in Building Spoken Language Dialogue Systems for Large Tasks

Context is of crucial importance to language understanding in general and plays a central role in spoken language dialogue systems design. Context, however, is hard to define. In this paper context is viewed as denoting a collection of aspects or contextual elements each of which may be defined and analysed with respect to its specific contribution to dialogue understanding. Massive exploitation of context is essential in spoken language dialogue systems design for large tasks because the feasibility of such systems demands a high degree of control of the user-system dialogue. The paper discusses in detail how knowledge about contextual elements is used in system-directed dialogue design to achieve an optimal trade-off between technological feasibility and user acceptability and to enable controlled steps in the direction of mixed-initiative dialogue. The discussion is based on the design, implementation and test of system-directed dialogue for a spoken language dialogue system and ...

DIPPER: Description and formalisation of an information-state update dialogue system architecture

2003

Abstract The DIPPER architecture is a collection of software agents for prototyping spoken dialogue systems. Implemented on top of the Open Agent Architecture (OAA), it comprises agents for speech input and output, dialogue management, and further supporting agents. We define a formal syntax and semantics for the DIPPER information state update language. The language is independent of particular programming languages, and incorporates procedural attachments for access to external resources using OAA.

Dialog Systems and their Inputs

One of the main limitations in existent domain-independent conver- sational agents is that the general and linguistic knowledge of these agents is limited to what the agents' developers explicitly defined. Therefore, a system which analyses user input at a deeper level of abstraction which backs its knowledge with common sense information will essentially result in a system that is capable of providing more adequate responses which in turn result in a better overall user experience. From this premise, a framework was proposed, and a working prototype was implemented upon this framework. These make use of various natural language processing tools, online and offline knowledge bases, and other information sources, to enable it to comprehend and construct relevant responses.