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Special Topic: Mixed Initiative

Initiative or control is concerned with who in the dialogue is starting or managing topics vs responding to them. For dialogue systems, this can be system, user, or mixed. In mixed initiative systems, it is important to decide when the system should be taking the initiative and when to follow the user. There are also several different definitions of different kinds of initiative.

Required Readings

  1. M Walker and S Whittaker Mixed Initiative in Dialogue: An Investigation into Discourse Segmentation" ACL 1990
  2. Jennifer Chu-Carroll Michael K. Brown  "Tracking Initiative in Collaborative Dialogue Interactions" ACL 1997
  3. M. English and P. Heeman. Learning mixed initiative dialog strategies by using reinforcement learning on both conversants. In Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1011-1018, Vancouver Canada, October 2005.
  4. Elnaz Nouri, David Traum Initiative Taking in Negotiation, In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2014

Other Readings
  1. Curry I. Guinn Mechanisms for Mixed-Initiative Human-Computer Collaborative Discourse in Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1996.
  2. Pamela Jordan, Barbara Di Eugenio Control and Initiative in Collaborative Problem Solving Dialogues in Working Notes of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Models for Mixed Initiative, 1997
  3. MASATO ISHIZAKI, MATTHEW CROCKER and CHRIS MELLISH Exploring Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Using Computer Dialogue Simulation User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 9: 79–91, 1999.
  4. Carl Andersen, David Traum, K. Purang, Darsana Purushothaman, and Don Perlis, Mixed Initiative Dialogue and Intelligence via Active Logic, in proceedings of the AAAI'99 Workshop on Mixed-Initiative Intelligence, pp. 60--67, July 1999.
  5. S. Narayanan, G. Di Fabbrizio, C. Kamm, J. Hubbell, B. Buntschuh, P. Ruscitti, J. Wright EFFECTS OF DIALOG INITIATIVE AND MULTI-MODAL PRESENTATION STRATEGIES ON LARGE DIRECTORY INFORMATION ACCESS ICSLP 2000
  6. P. Heeman and S.Strayer "Adaptive modeling of dialogue initiative,. Proceedings of the NAACL Workshop on Adaption in Dialogue Systems, pages 79--80, Pittsburgh, USA, June 2001
  7. Mark G. Core, Johanna D. Moore, and Claus Zinn, The Role of Initiative in Tutorial Dialogue in proceedings of the 10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary, April, 2003.
  8. F. Yang and P. Heeman. Exploring Initiative Strategies Using Computer Simulation. In Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, Antwerp Belgium, August 2007.
  9. Fabrizio Morbini, Eric Forbell, David DeVault, Kenji Sagae, David Traum and Albert Rizzo. A Mixed-Initiative Conversational Dialogue System for Healthcare. Demonstration in SIGdial 2012, the 13th Annual SIGdial meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, Seoul, South Korea, 2012.
  10. Angela Nazarian, Elnaz Nouri, and David Traum Initiative Patterns in Dialogue Genres, poster presented at Semdial 2014 (DialWatt), August, 2014. pp. 229-230.