Throughout this congress we have heard many moving testimonies. On Thursday the stories highlighted the presence of Jesus among the peoples of Asia, especially among the poor and marginalised. On Friday stories witnessed to Jesus amidst the great religions of Asia. Today testimonies have focused upon the cultures of Asia. In day-to-day life we do not neatly separate these three aspects. As the ...

This paper describes the language output component of the Sundial spoken dialogue system. Following a dialogue planning decision to produce an utterance, an utterance planning component derives a semantic description drawing on a model of speakers' knowledge of the domain. This semantic description is linguistically real-ised by a generation component which draws on a bi-directional lexicon-gra...

verbmobil, a speech to speech translation system, poses new and challenging tasks for a dialogue component. We present a part of the dialogue component of verbmobil: a robust plan recognizer that processes all of the over 200 dialogues of the verb-mobil corpus. The recognizer currently handles unexpected sequences of input, and will in the future deal with multiple input, hypotheses, and incomp...

This paper proposes a cognitive architecture of an intelligent agent that can have a dialogue with a human agent on health-related topics. This architecture consists of four main components, namely, the Belief Base, the Dialogue Manager, the Task Manager and the Plan Generator. Each component has sub-components that perform a set of tasks for the purpose to enable the agent to be enrolled in a ...

A number of methods are implemented in the face-to-face translation system VERBMOBIL to improve its robustness. In this paper, we describe clarification dialogues as one method to deal with incomplete or inconsistent information. Currently, three • types of clarification dialogues are realized: subdialogues concerning phonological ambiguities, unknown words and semantic inconsistencies. For eac...

This paper describes a novel method by which a spoken dialogue system can learn to choose an optimal dialogue strategy from its experience interacting with human users. The method is based on a combination of reinforcement learning and performance modeling of spoken dialogue systems. The reinforcement learning component applies Q-learning (Watkins, 1989), while the performance modeling componen...

This study analyzes 39 Atlantic and seven Pacific benthic δC records to characterize obliquity and precession responses in Atlantic overturning since 3 Ma. Regional benthic δC stacks are also analyzed. A major transition in orbital responses is observed at 1.5–1.6 Ma coincident with the first glacial shoaling of Northern Component Water. Since ∼1.5 Ma, the phases of Atlantic benthic δC records ...

Das diesem Bericht zugrundeliegende Forschungsvorhaben wurde mit Mitteln des Bundesministers f ur Forschung und Technologie unter dem FF orderkenn-zeichen 01 IV 101 K/1 geff ordert. Die Verantwortung f ur den Inhalt dieser Arbeit liegt bei den Autoren. Abstract We present the dialogue component of the speech-to-speech translation system verbmobil. In contrast to conventional dialogue systems it...

The DORIS project aims to develop a spoken dialogue module for an autonomous robotic agent. This paper examines the techniques used by Scusi?, the speech interpretation component of DORIS, to postulate and assess hypotheses regarding the meaning of a spoken utterance. The results of our evaluation are encouraging, yielding good interpretation performance for utterances of different types and le...