Explanation and argumentation can be used together in such a way that evidence, in the form of arguments, is used to support explanations. In a hybrid system, the interlocking of argument and explanation compounds the problem of how to differentiate between them. The distinction is imperative if we want to avoid the mistake of treating something as fallacious while it is not. Furthermore, the t...

In this paper we show how established object modelling techniques can be used in the creation of spoken dialogue management systems. One of the motivations behind the particular approach adopted here is the observation that, in spoken human-to-human dialogues, certain skillsets and patterns of dialogue evolution are common to many different contexts; other dialogue skills and accompanying real-...

BACKGROUND There is a need to understand scientific evidence in light of the context within which it will be used. Deliberative dialogues are a promising strategy that can be used to meet this evidence interpretation challenge. METHODS We evaluated a deliberative dialogue held by a transnational violence prevention network. The deliberative dialogue included researchers and knowledge user par...

Recent advancements in the area of spoken language processing and the wide acceptance of portable devices, have attracted significant interest in spoken dialogue systems. These conversational systems are man-machine interfaces which use natural language (speech) as the medium of interaction. In order to conduct dialogues, computers must have the ability to decide when and what information has t...

We demonstrate a “Companion” ECA, which is able to provide advice and support to the user, taking into account emotions expressed by her through dialogue. The integration of all required multimodal I/O components is based on interaction strategies defining the shape of dialogue, on the ECA’s response times, and on the underlying affective strategy. The system supports free conversation on an ev...

This report describes the implementation of Loquendo‟s spoken dialog application for the Evalita 2009 Spoken Dialog System (SDS) Evaluation task. The application was designed in VoiceXML and runs on the Loquendo VoxNauta platform. The dialogue strategy is „mixed-initiative‟, with flexible recognition grammars that were designed to be modular and easy to use in different dialogue application con...

Recent progress in the eld of spoken natural language understanding expanded the scope of spoken language systems to include mixed initiative dialogue. Currently there are no agreed upon theoretical foundations for the design of such systems. In this work we propose a stochastic model of computer-human interactions. This model can be used for learning and adaptation of the dialogue strategy and...

Dialogues may be seen as comprising commonplace routines on the one hand and specialized, task-specific interactions on the other. Object-orientation is an established means of separating the generic from the specialized. The system under discussion combines this objectoriented approach with a self-organizing, mixed-initiative dialogue strategy, raising the possibility of dialogue systems that ...

This paper describes an interpretation and decision strategy that minimizes interpretation errors and perform dialogue actions which may not depend on the hypothesized concepts only, but also on confidence of what has been recognized. The concepts introduced here are applied in a system which integrates language and interpretation models into Stochastic Finite State Transducers (SFST). Furtherm...

Modelling dialogue, that is, designing formal systems that reproduce aspects of natural conversation, is a challenging task. Not only must a dialogue model be able to handle most (if not all) of the linguistic phenomena that make monological discourse hard to model (e.g., anaphora, presuppositions, implicatures), there are also additional requirements: unlike (written) text, dialogue unfolds in...