The design of the user experience has increasingly become a goal in developing interactive systems during the last years. Since then, several attempts have been made to broaden interactive system design’s traditional focus on the efficient achievement of goals to better understand additional aspects that contribute to user experience. In this paper, I first give an overview of different approac...

Over the last decades a divide seems to have emerged in the cognitive sciences between embodied and symbolic approaches to language understanding. Embodied approaches argue that language comprehension requires activation of our experiences with the world, whereas symbolic approaches argue that language comprehension relies on interdependencies of words. The current paper argues that language co...

In the project "Procedural Dialogue Models" being carried on at the University of Bielefeld we have developed an Incremental multilevel parsing formalism to reconstruct task-oriented dialogues. A major difficulty we have had to overcome is that the dialogues are real ones with numerous ungrammatical utterances. The approach we have devised to cope with this problem is reported here. I THE INCRE...

One of the big challenges in understanding text, i.e., constructing an overall coherent representation of the text, is that much information needed in that representation is unstated (implicit). Thus, in order to "fill in the gaps" and create an overall representation, language processing systems need a large amount of world knowledge, and creating those knowledge resources remains a fundamenta...

Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories has been designing, developing, testing, and evaluating spoken language understanding systems in several unique operational environments over the past six years. Through these experiences we have encountered numerous challenges in making each system become a useful and trustworthy tool that is an integral part of a user’s operations. In this pape...

Written instructions are a common way of teaching people how to accomplish tasks on the web. However, studies have shown that written instructions are difficult to follow, even for experienced users. A system that understands human-written instructions could guide users through the process of following the directions, improving completion rates and enhancing the user experience. While general n...