In this chapter we describe the Vidiam project, which concerns the development of a dialogue management system for multi-modal question answering dialogues as it was carried out in the IMIX project. The approach that was followed is data-driven, that is, corpus-based. Since research in Question Answering Dialog for multi-modal information retrieval is still new, no suitable corpora were availab...

In this paper, we present a general framework and architecture for maintaining dialogue coordination in spoken dialogue systems, in which intended behaviors and goals are incrementally performed during the course of maintaining dialogue coordination. The dialogue structure emerges as a result from interaction between user and the dialogue system. The key feature of this design for the systems i...

We aim at the establishment of the method of controlling dialogues according to performance in computation. So that the system takes the most suitable dialogue strategy according to performance in computation, it needs to calculate evaluation functions modeled with performance in computation in the inside all time. In this paper, we propose degree of presenting process status as evaluation func...

This paper explores the regulatory philosophies underlying the debates on privacy in e-commerce in the European Union and the United States. It offers a framework to grasp these differences and suggests that, in the ultimate, e-commerce players with transatlantic ambitions may need different organizations to deal with the EU and US

This article introduces a simulator for incremental humanmachine dialogue in order to generate artificial dialogue datasets that can be used to train and test data-driven methods. We review the various simulator components in detail, including an unstable speech recognizer, and their differences with non-incremental approaches. Then, as an illustration of its capacities, an incremental strategy...

This article explores how dialogue journals can lead to a transformative learning experience. Adult Latino students enrolled in a community college developmental reading class agree to speak truth to power through this critical writing process. Using Mezirow’s(2002) transformational learning theory, Brookfield’s (2000) concepts on teaching for critical thinking, and Cranton’s (2000) ideas of in...

System-initiated proposals may be used to introduce new and unsolicited information into the dialogue flow of an automated telephone service in order to advise callers about products in which they may be interested such as short-term loans or overdrafts. Important dialogue design issues surrounding the introduction of such digressive proposals include how to interrupt the callers and where in t...

Restrictions of interactivity in dialogue are often seen as having negative impact on the efficiency of the dialogue, as they affect the ability to give immediate feedback (Whittaker, 2003). We have conducted experiments with one such restriction common in spoken dialogue systems, namely push-totalk. While our results confirm many predictions from the literature (fewer but longer turns; reducti...

In this paper, an original framework to model human-machine spoken dialogues is proposed to deal with co-adaptation between users and Spoken Dialogue Systems in non-cooperative tasks. The conversation is modeled as a Stochastic Game: both the user and the system have their own preferences but have to come up with an agreement to solve a non-cooperative task. They are jointly trained so the Dial...

In this paper we present extensions to the spoken dialogue system EVAR which are crucial issues for the next generation dialogue systems. EVAR was developed at the University of Erlangen. In 1994, it became accessible over telephone line and could answer inquiries in the German language about German InterCity train connections. It has since been continuously improved and extended, including som...