The status and the treatment of detainees in the ‘war on terror’ is one of the major contentious topics in current transatlantic relations. This article aims to explain the reasons for transatlantic disunity on this issue as well as to assess its impact on the stability and the persistence of the transatlantic security community. I argue that divergent strategic cultures are the main source of ...

In this paper we explore how compositional semantics, discourse structure, and the cogni-tive states of participants all contribute to pragmatic constraints on answers to questions in dialogue. We synthesise formal semantic theories on questions and answers with techniques for discourse interpretation familiar from computational linguistics, and show how this provides richer constraints on resp...

During the past decade there has been substantial improvements in natural language processing, speech recognition and text-to-speech conversion. Spoken dialogue is the missing component in between of these, making it possible to develop conversational interfaces to computers. In this paper I introduce the basics of spoken dialogue systems and present some applications using these techniques.

This paper discusses the range of ways in which spoken dialogue system components have been evaluated and discusses approaches to evaluation that attempt to integrate component evaluation into an overall view of system performance. We will argue that the PARADISE (PARAdigm for Dialogue System Evaluation) framework has several advantages over other proposals.

This paper describes the dialogue module of the Mercury system, which has been under development over the past year or two. Mercury provides telephone access to an on-line ight database, and allows users to plan and price itineraries between major airports worldwide. The main focus of this paper is the dialogue control strategy, which is based on a set of ordered rules as a mechanism to manage ...

We describe an evaluation of an information state-based dialogue manager by measuring its accuracy in information state component updating.

In this paper, we present a neural network based task-oriented dialogue system that can be optimized end-to-end with deep reinforcement learning (RL). The system is able to track dialogue state, interface with knowledge bases, and incorporate query results into agent’s responses to successfully complete task-oriented dialogues. dialogue policy learning is conducted with a hybrid supervised and ...

The development of a spoken dialogue system is a complex process involving the integration of several component technologies. Various toolkits and authoring environments have been produced that provide assistance with this process. This paper reports on several projects involving CSLU’s RAD (Rapid Application Developer) and critically evaluates the applicability of state transition diagrams for...

We present a new approach for rapidly developing dialogue capabilities for virtual humans. Starting from domain specification, an integrated authoring interface automatically generates dialogue acts with all possible contents. These dialogue acts are linked to example utterances in order to provide training data for natural language understanding and generation. The virtual human dialogue syste...