Spoken dialog tasks incur many errors including speech recognition errors, understanding errors, and even dialog management errors. These errors create a big gap between the user’s intention and the system’s understanding, which eventually results in a misinterpretation. To fill in the gap, people in human-to-human dialogs try to clarify the major causes of the misunderstanding to selectively c...

This paper argues for the use of more natural and flexible clarification questions in spoken dialogue systems. Several forms and aspects of clarification questions are discussed and exemplified by examples from human-human dialogue corpora. We show how clarification questions fit into the broader context of miscommunication and describe the types of information spoken dialogue systems need in o...

We offer a computational analysis of the resolution of ellipsis in certain cases of dialogue clarification. We show that this goes beyond standard techniques used in anaphora and ellipsis resolution and requires operations on highly structured, linguistically heterogeneous representations. We characterize these operations and the representations on which they operate. We offer an analysis couch...

several scientists held the hope that the "Maltoni" work would clarify questions about MTBE's carcinogenic potential. Despite the enthusiasm of some scientists for Belpoggi's results, the most cursory examination of the paper reveals critical issues that show the data have been grossly overinterpreted. Rather than predicting a health hazard, the data indicate that rats tolerate enormous daily o...

This paper describes the results of corpus and experimental investigation into the factors that affect the way clarification questions in dialogue are interpreted, and the way they are responded to. We present some results from an investigation using the BNC which show some general correlations between clarification request type, likelihood of answering, answer type and distance between questio...

Thank you for raising these issues and the debate this has generated. Below we have responded to all your points, where our aim is to show that our contention is not with the need to develop an aerobic base, but rather the extent to which it should be developed and the methods used in achieving this. Also, while we recognize there are three swords, we will outline an argument that the strength ...

Our hypothesis is that conversational implicatures are a rich source of clarification questions. In this paper we do two things. First, we motivate the hypothesis in theoretical, practical and empirical terms. Second, we present a framework for generating the clarification potential of an instruction by inferring its conversational implicatures with respect to a particular context. General mean...

Much energy has been expended in understanding the chemist:y of clarific~tion with a view to optimising the process. ThIS paper reviews current practice and considers the mechanisms and chemistry from a practical standpoint and the effect they have on the removal of impurities.