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Special Topic: Dialogue Genres: Task-oriented, Tutoring, Casual Conversation, Information-seeking

There are several different types of domain (or genres) for dialogue systems. One big classification is task-oriented, vs casual conversation. Task-oriented can be divided into action-oriented or information-oriented. There are also distinctions about the goal of the interaction, e.g. transaction, solve a task, tutorial, negotiation. Different architectures, sets of dialogue acts and processing methods have been proposed for different kinds of genres. In addition, there is some work on switching between domains and even genres.

Required Readings

  1. David Traum, Talking to Virtual Humans: Dialogue Models and Methodologies for Embodied Conversational Agents" In I Wachsmuth and G Knoblich (Ed.), Modeling Communication with Robots and Virtual Humans, pp. 296-309, 2008. pre-release version
  2. Mikio Nakano, Shun Sato, Kazunori Komatani, Kyoko Matsuyama, Kotaro Funakoshi and Hiroshi G. Okuno A Two-Stage Domain Selection Framework for Extensible Multi-Domain Spoken Dialogue Systems Proceedings of Sigdial 2011 pp. 18-29.

Other Readings
  1. Nils Dahlback Kinds of Agents and Types of Dialogues In Proceedings of the Ninth Twente Workshop on Language Technology, Universiteit Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, 1995.
  2. Ahlsén, Elisabeth, Allwood, Jens & Nivre, Joakim Feedback in Different Social Activities. In P. Juel-Henrichsen (ed.) Nordic Research on Relations between Utterances. Copenhagen Working Papers in LSP, 3. 2003, ISBN, pp.9-37

  3. Malte Gabsdil Clarification in Spoken Dialogue Systems AAAI Spring Symposium on Natural Language Generation in Spoken and Written Dialogue, 2003.
  4. Nikesh Garera and David Yarowsky Modeling Latent Biographic Attributes in Conversational Genres Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th IJCNLP of the AFNLP, pages 710–718, Suntec, Singapore, 2-7 August 2009.
  5. Angela Nazarian, Elnaz Nouri, and David Traum Initiative Patterns in Dialogue Genres, poster presented at Semdial 2014 (DialWatt), August, 2014. pp. 229-230.