Computational
Approaches to Natural Language Dialogue Modelling
CS 599 Spring 2004
Meeting time: Tuesday 3:30 - 6:20pm THH203
Webpage: http://www.ict.usc.edu/~traum/cs599s04
Instructor: David Traum (Research Assistant Professor, CS)
Pre-requisite: One of the following courses or approval of instructor: CS 544 (Natural Language Processing) or CS 562 (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing) or EE619 (Advanced Topics in Speech Recognition.
Description:
Natural language dialogue involves extended communication (multiple utterances) using natural language) between two or more participants. Dialogue modelling concerns the coherence that 'glues' these utterances together: How can a new utterance be understood given the context of what has come before? How can one use context to predict what will come next? How can one use the context to decide what should come next (especially to produce a contribution by a dialogue participant)? Computational models can help formalize answers to these questions and also provide the basis of systems that can track and understand dialogue and participate in dialogue with a human user. Dialogue systems are both an old topic in AI/ Computer Science (with famous early examples such as Eliza, Lunar, and SHRDLU) and a topic of much current research. Moreover, dialogue systems have become a commercial reality, with companies such as SpeechWorks and Nuance as well as others fielding automated information systems.
This course is intended to introduce students to the basic phenomena in natural language dialogue, standard techniques for dialogue modeling in dialogue systems, and areas of current research in the field. The course will consist of 1/2 lectures by the instructor, and 1/2 group discussion of research papers, mostly led by students. Students should come away from the course with a basic understanding of the topic, and be able to:
-implement simple dialogue systems
-read and assess research papers in the area
-embark on new research in the area
Course Requirements: Grading
[1] reading and reviewing assigned papers 10%
[2] participation in class discussions 10%
[3] leading one discussion topic based on assigned readings 20%
[4] 2-3 small assignments 20%
[5] main project 40%
Tentative Schedule:
| Class |
Topics |
Readings |
| January
20 |
Lectures: Overview
of the general topic: what is dialogue, dialogue
genres, dialogue system components, techniques for dialogue modelling or dialogue management |
Discourse and Dialogue. Grosz, Barbara; Scott, Donia; Kamp, Hans; Cohen, Phil; Giachin, Egidio. Chapter 6 of Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology, R. Cole, J. Mariani, H. Uszkoreit, A. Zaenen, & V. Zue (eds.), Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Dialogue and Conversational Agents. Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin. Chapter 19 of Speech and Language Processing, Prentice Hall, 2000. |
| January
27 |
Lectures: Simple
Dialogue techniques: trees and finite state approaches, key
phrase reactive approaches, Voice
XML
|
ELIZA--A
Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication
Between Man and Machine Communications of the ACM Volume 9, Number 1
(January 1966):
36-45. Vector-Based
Natural
Language Call Routing.
Jennifer
Chu-Carroll, Bob Carpenter. Journal of Computational Linguistics,
25(30), pp.
361-388, 1999. http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/68836.html
Sutton, S., Novick, D.G., Cole,
R., Vermeulen, P., de Villiers, J., Schalkwyk, J. and Fanty, M., "Building
10,000 Spoken-Dialogue Systems,"
Proceedings of the 1996 International Conference on Spoken Language
Processing,
Philadelphia, PA, 709-712, October, 1996. |
| February
3 |
Lectures: Frame-based Approaches, Information-state approaches |
David
Traum and Staffan Larsson, The
Information State Approach to Dialogue Management in Current
and New Directions in Discourse and Dialogue, Ed. Jan van Kuppevelt
and Ronnie Smith, Kluwer, 2003, pp 325-354. Colin Matheson, Massimo Poesio, and David Traum, Modelling Grounding and Discourse Obligations Using Update Rules, in Proceedings of the 1st Annual Meeting of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL2000), May 2000.
D. Goddeau, H. Meng, J. Polifroni, S. Seneff, and S. Busayapongchai. 1996. A form-based dialogue manager for spoken language applications. In Proc. ICSLP, 1996 pp. 701--704. V. Zue, et al., "JUPITER: A Telephone-Based Conversational Interface for Weather Information," IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, Vol. 8 , No. 1, January 2000. |
| February
10 |
Lectures: Theorem Proving, Plan- and
Agent-based approaches (I) |
Smith, D.R. Hipp, and A.W. Biermann. An Architecture for Voice Dialog Systems Based on Prolog-Style Theorem Proving. Computational Linguistics, 21:3, 1995.
Perrault
and Allen A
plan-based
analysis of indirect speech acts.
Computational Linguistics,
6:167-183, 1980 Defining a Conversational Agent. James Allen. Chapter 17 of Natural Language Understanding, Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, 1995. Lecure Notes |
| February 17 | Lectures: Theorem Proving, Plan- and
Agent-based approaches (II) |
The
TRAINS Project. James F. Allen et al. Journal of
Experimental
and
Theoretical AI, 1995. Effective
Human-Computer
Cooperative Spoken Dialogue: The Ags Demonstrator (Make
Corrections) M.D. Sadek,
A. Ferrieux, A. Cozannet, P.
Bretier, F. Panaget, J. Simonin Proceedings of the Fourth
International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP'96) Design Considerations on Dialgue Systems: From Theory to Technology - The Case of Artimis. David Sadek. ESCA Workshop ``Interactive Dialogue in Multi-modal Systems,'' pp. 173-187, 1999. Rich, C.; Sidner, C.L.; Lesh, N.B., "COLLAGEN: Applying Collaborative Discourse Theory to Human-Computer Interaction", Artificial Intelligence Magazine, Winter 2001 (Vol 22, Issue 4, pps 15-25) Rich, C.; Sidner, C.L., "COLLAGEN: A Collaboration Manager for Software Interface Agents", An International Journal: User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Vol. 8, Issue 3/4, pps 315-350, 1998 |
| February
24 |
Lectures: Dialogue System Evaluation |
Sikorski,
T., and Allen, J. F. A
task-based evaluation of the TRAINS-95 dialogue system. In
Proceedings of the Workshop on Dialog Processing in Spoken Language
Systems, ECAI-96 (Budapest, 1996).
Assessing Agreement
on Classification Tasks: The Kappa Statistic. Jean Carletta.
Computational Linguistics, 22(2):249-254, 1996. Towards
Developing General Models of Usability with PARADISE. Marilyn
A.
Walker,
Diane J. Litman, Candace. A. Kamm and Alicia Abella. Natural
Language
Engineering, 2000. M. Walker, R. Passonneau, J. Aberdeen, J. Boland, E. Bratt, J. Garofolo, L. Hirschman, A. Le, S. Lee, S. Narayanan, K. Papineni, B. Pellom, J. Polifroni, A. Potamianos, P. Prabhu, A. Rudnicky, G. Sanders, S. Seneff, D. Stallard, S. Whittaker. Cross-Site Evaluation in DARPA Communicator: The June 2000 Data Collection Submitted to Computer Speech and Language , 2002. Quantitative
and Qualitative Evaluation of Darpa Communicator Spoken Dialogue Systems.
Marilyn Walker, Rebecca Passonneau and Julie E. Boland. Proceedings
of the
Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2001. Lecture Notes |
| March
2 |
Lectures: Overview
of specialized research topics Demos: student presentations of Assignment 2 systems |
Lecture Notes Anish: Rad, VXML, Antonio: outline of both, Sudeep: Rad |
| March
9 |
Discussion (Leader: Jens Stephan) Referring in Dialogue |
Attention,
Intentions, and the
Structure of Discourse. Barbara J. Grosz, Candace L. Sidner.
Computational
Linguistics, volume 12, number 3, July-September 1986, pp.
175-204.
Clark, H. H. &
Wilkes-Gibbs, D. (1992). Referring as a Collaborative Process. In H. H. Clark (Ed.), Arenas of Language
Use,
107-143. Chicago: University Press.
Eckert, Miriam & Michael Strube (1999). Resolving discourse deictic anaphora in dialogues. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Bergen, Norway, 8-12 June 1999., pp. 37--44.
Donna
K. Byron and James F. Allen. What's
a Reference Resolution Module to
do?
Redefining the Role of Reference in Language Understanding Systems.
In
the
proceedings of the 4th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution
Colloquium (DAARC2002)
|
| March
9 |
Discussion (Leader: Antonio Roque) Initiative in Dialogue |
"Mixed Initiative in
Dialogue:
An Investigation into Discourse Segmentation" M Walker and S
Whittaker ACL 1990 Control and Initiative in Collaborative Problem Solving Dialogues (1997) Pamela Jordan, Barbara Di Eugenio in Working Notes of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Models for Mixed Initiative Jennifer Chu-Carroll Michael K. Brown "Tracking Initiative in Collaborative Dialogue Interactions" ACL 1997 "Adaptive modeling of dialogue initiative,'' P. Heeman and S. Strayer. Proceedings of the NAACL Workshop on Adaption in Dialogue Systems, pages 79--80, Pittsburgh, USA, June 2001 Lecture Notes |
| March
16 |
Spring
Break |
|
| March 23 | Lectures: Dialogue
Genres and Dialogue Act Taxonomies |
David
R. Traum, Speech
Acts for Dialogue Agents, in Michael
Wooldridge and
Anand Rao, editors, "Foundations And Theories Of Rational Agents",
Kluwer Academic Publishers, pages 169--201, 1999. The
Reliability of a Dialogue Structure Coding Scheme. Carletta,
J.
C., Isard,
A., Isard, S., Kowtko, J., Doherty-Sneddon, G., & Anderson, A. Computational
Linguistics, 23(1), 1997. Coding Dialogs with the DAMSL Annotation Scheme. Mark Core, James Allen. AAAI Fall Symposium on Communicative Action, 1997.
Lecure Notes |
| March
23 |
Discussion (Leader: Viktor Rozgic) Learning Approaches to Dialogue |
Levin,
E., and Pieraccini, R. (1997). A
stochastic model of computer-human interaction for learning dialogue
strategies. In Proc. 5th European Conf. on Speech Communication and
Technology. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/levin97stochastic.html Spoken Dialog Management Using Probabilistic Reasoning. N. Roy, J. Pineau & S. Thrun. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2000. MIMIC: An adaptive mixed initiative spoken dialogue system for information queries. Jennifer Chu-Carroll. Proceedings of the 6th ACL Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing (ANLP), 2000. Optimizing Dialogue Management with Reinforcement Learning: Experiments with the NJFun System. Satinder Singh, Diane Litman, Michael Kearns and Marilyn Walker. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), Vol. 16, 2002. Designing and Evaluating an Adaptive Spoken Dialogue System. Diane J. Litman and Shimei Pan. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, to appear. |
| March
30 |
Discussion (Leader: Sudeep Gandhe) Multi-party dialogue |
David
Traum,
Issues in
multi-party dialogues, in Advances in Agent Communication Ed.
F. Dignum, Springer-Verlag LNAI 2922 pp 201-211, 2004. Ishizaki, M. and T. Kato (1998) Exploring the Characteristics of Multi-Party Dialogue, In Proc. of the 17th COLING-ACL'98, pp.583-589 Carletta, J., Anderson, A. H., & Garrod, S. (2002). Seeing eye to eye: an account of grounding and understanding in work groups. Cognitive Studies: Bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society, 9(1), 1-20, March. Invited paper for the special issue entitled "Towards Sciences of Linguistic Communication". ISSN 13417924 CobotDS: A Spoken Dialogue System for Chat. Michael Kearns, Charles Isbell, Satinder Singh, Diane Litman, and Jessica Howe. AAAI 2002. |
| March
30 |
Discussion (Leader: Abe Kazemzadeh) grounding and repair |
David
R. Traum Computational
Models of Grounding in Collaborative Systems,
in
working notes of AAAI Fall Symposium on Psychological Models of
Communication, p. 124-131, November, 1999. Reducing Miscommunication in Spoken Human-Machine Dialogue. Dybkjaer, L., Bernsen, N.O. and Dybkjaer, H. Proc. of AAAI Workshop on Detecting, Repairing and Preventing Human-Machine Miscommunication. Portland OR, 1996. E. Krahmer, M. Swerts, M. Theune and M. Weegels. Error Detection in Spoken Human-Machine Interaction. In: International Journal of Speech Technology, 4(1):19-30, 2001. Nakano, Y., Reinstein, G., Stocky, T., Cassell, J. (2003) "Towards a Model of Face-to-Face Grounding" Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. July 7-12, Sapporo, Japan. |
| April
6 |
Discussion (Leader: Anish Nair) Automatic Dialogue Act Recognition |
Norbert
Reithinger. Some
Experiments in Speech
Act Prediction. In AAAI 95 Spring Symposium on Empirical Methods in
Discourse Interpretation and Generation, 1995.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/reithinger95some.html Dialogue
Act Tagging with Transformation-Based Learning. Ken Samuel,
Sandra
Carberry, and K. Vijay-Shanker. Proceedings of the 36th Meeting of
the
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 1998. Dialogue
Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational
Speech.
Andreas Stolcke, Klaus Ries, Noah Coccaro, Elizabeth Shriberg, Rebecca
Bates,
Daniel Jurafsky, Paul Taylor, Rachel Martin, Marie Meteer, and Carol
Van
Ess-Dykema. Computational Linguistics
26:3, 2000.
|
| April
6 |
Discussion (Leader: Nishit Rathod) dialogue tracking in other language-processing systems |
Jan Alexandersson. Plan Recognition in VERBMOBIL. Verbmobil-Report 81. DFKI GmbH. May 1995. Jan Alexandersson, Norbert Reithinger, Elisabeth Maier. Insights into the Dialogue Processing of VERBMOBIL. Verbmobil-Report 191. DFKI GmbH Saarbrücken. March 1997. Birte Schmitz. Collaboration in Automatic Dialogue Interpreting. Verbmobil-Report 212. Technische Universität Berlin. August 1997. Klaus Zechner, 2001. Automatic Generation of Concise Summaries of Spoken Dialogues in Unrestricted Domains. Proceedings of the 24th ACM-SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, New Orleans, LA, September 2001 Alex Waibel, Michael Bett, Florian Metze, Klaus Ries, Thomas Schaaf, Tanja Schultz, Hagen Soltau, Hua Yu, and Klaus Zechner, 2001. Advances in Automatic Meeting Record Creation and Access. Proceedings of ICASSP-2001, Salt Lake City, UT, May 2001. N. Boufaden, G. Lapalme, and Y. Bengio. Topic segmentation : First Stage of Dialogue-Based Information extraction Process. In Proceedings of the Natural Language Pacific Rim Symposium, NLPRS-01, 2001 |
| April
13 |
Guest Lecture: Dr Hannes Vilhjalmsson Embodiment (the role the body plays) in Dialogue |
BEAT: the Behavior Expression Animation Toolkit, Cassell, J., Vilhjálmsson, H., and Bickmore, (2001), Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2001, Los Angeles, August 12-17, p.477-486 Cassell, J., T. Stocky, T. Bickmore, Y. Gao, Y. Nakano, K. Ryokai, D. Tversky, C. Vaucelle, H. Vilhjlmsson. MACK: Media lab Autonomous Conversational Kiosk. In Imagina 02. February 12-15, 2002. Monte Carlo. |
| April
13 |
Discussion (Leader: Michael Rushforth) Tutorial Dialogue Systems |
Intelligent
Tutoring Systems with Conversational Dialogue. Arthur Graesser,
Kurt VanLehn, Carolyn Rose, Pamela Jordan and Derek Harter. AI Magazine. Evens, Martha W., Stefan Brandle, Ru-Charn Chang, Reva Freedman, Michael Glass, Yoon Hee Lee, Leem Seop Shim, Chong Woo Woo, Yuemei Zhang, Yujian Zhou, Joel A. Michael, and Allen A. Rovick CIRCSIM-Tutor: An Intelligent Tutoring System Using Natural Language Dialogue Twelfth Midwest AI and Cognitive Science Conference, MAICS 2001, Oxford, OH, pp. 16-23. Teaching Tactics and Dialog in Autotutor. Arthur C. Graesser, Natalie K. Person, Derek Harter and the Tutoring Research Group. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 2001. Supporting Constructive Learning with a Feedback Planner. M. G. Core, J. D. Moore, and C. Zinn, AAAI Fall Symposium on Building Dialogue Systems for Tutorial Applications, 2000. Using a Model of Collaborative Dialogue to Teach Procedural Tasks. Jeff Rickel, Neal Lesh, Charles Rich, Candace L. Sidner and Abigail Gertner. Proceedings of 10th International Conference on AI in Education, 2001. |
| April
20 |
Class
Project Presentations (1) |
Jens
Stephan Michael Rushforth Anish Nair & Viktor Rozgic |
| April
27 |
Class
Project Presentations (2) |
Nishit
Rathod Antonio Roque Sudeep Gandhe Abe Kazemzadeh |
Selected
Specialty Topics
| referring in dialogue: | (see above) |
|
grounding and repair: |
(see above) |
| Dialogue Act Taxonomies: |
(see above) |
| Automatic Dialogue Act Recognition: |
(see above) |
| Initiative in Dialogue |
(see above) |
| Learning Approaches to Dialogue |
(see above) |
| Embodied Conversational Agents |
W.L. Johnson, J.W.
Rickel, and J.C. Lester. Animated Pedagogical
Agents: Face-to-Face Interaction in Interactive Learning Environments.
International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 11:47-78,
2000. Jeff Rickel, Stacy Marsella, Jonathan Gratch, Randall Hill, David Traum, and William Swartout, Towards a New Generation of Virtual Humans for Interactive Experiences, in IEEE Intelligent Systems, 17(4):32--38, 2002. Tim Bickmore, Justine Cassell (in press) "Social Dialogue with Embodied Conversational Agents" In J. van Kuppevelt, L. Dybkjaer, and N. Bernsen (eds.), Natural, Intelligent and Effective Interaction with Multimodal Dialogue Systems. New York: Kluwer Academic Cassell, J., T. Stocky, T. Bickmore, Y. Gao, Y. Nakano, K. Ryokai, D. Tversky, C. Vaucelle, H. Vilhjlmsson. MACK: Media lab Autonomous Conversational Kiosk. In Imagina 02. February 12-15, 2002. Monte Carlo. André, Elisabeth, Rist, Thomas, Susanne van Mulken, Martin Klesen and Stephan Baldes: The Automated Design of Believable Dialogues for Animated Presentation Teams, in: J. Cassell, J. Sullivan, S. Prevost and E. Churchill: Embodied Conversational Agents, MIT Press, pp: 220-255, 2000.. |
| Multi-modal Dialogue |
André, Elisabeth: Natural Language in
Multimedia/Multimodal Systems, Handbook of Computational
Linguistics, , R. Mitkov, 650-669, Oxford University Press, 2003 AdApt - a multimodal conversational dialogue system in an apartment domain. Gustafson J, Bell L, Beskow J, Boye J, Carlson R, Edlund J, Granstrom, B, House D & Wiren M. Proc. of ICSLP, 2000. The efficiency of multimodal interaction for a map-based task. Cohen, P. R., McGee, D. R., Clow, J. Proceedings of the Applied Natural Language Processing Conference (ANLP), 2000. |
| Multi-party dialogue |
(see above) |
| Discourse Structure in Dialogue |
A coding manual
for the
Linkoping dialogue model (1998) Nils Dahlbäck, Arne Jönsson A Two-level Approach to Coding Dialogue for Discourse Structure: Activities of the 1998 DRI Working Group on Higher-level Structures David R. Traum, Christine H. Nakatani in proceedings of the ACL'99 Workshop Towards Standards and Tools for Discourse Tagging, pp 101--108, June 1999. |
|
dialogue tracking in other language-processing systems (machine translation, summarization/extraction) |
(see above) |
| Tutorial Dialogue Systems |
(see
above) |