Natural language requests involving vague spatial concepts are not easily communicated to a GIS because the meaning of spatial concepts depends largely on the contexts (such as task, spatial contexts, and user’s personal background) that may or may not be available or specified in the system. To address such problems, we developed a collaborative dialogue approach that enables the system and th...

Users’ participation in the design process may change the overall goals of the design. Also, the context in which a prototype is tested might play a critical role in the design process. This paper presents how the contexts of use and a dialogue among users and designers shaped the DHS system. The DHS is a Web-based system that allows users to attach a commentary to certain Web documents. This s...

Facilitating participation has become one of the cornerstones of co-design, and a number of methods, techniques and events intended to inspire design participants and scaffold collaborative ideation and concept development have been developed. However, an aspect that is yet relatively unexplored in co-design literature is how different methods and techniques can be productively combined. In thi...

We describe a BDI (Belief, Desire, Intention) approach and architecture for a conversational virtual companion embodied as a child’s Toy. Our aim is to support both structured conversation-based activities (e.g., story-telling, collaborative games) as well as more free-flowing, engaging dialogue with variation and some unpredictability. We argue that a goal-oriented approach to the agent’s conv...

We present an efficient approach for identifying, learning and modeling the policies of others during collaborative activities. In a set of experiments, we demonstrate that more accurate models of others’ policies (or norms) can be developed more rapidly using various forms of evidence from argumentation-based dialogue.

This paper examines the relational view of the person in Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue. Shifts toward the relational are considered in the context of human development, gender studies, psychotherapy, and family therapy. A dialogical approach to couples therapy is presented, in which partners are encouraged to move toward a more collaborative, empathic relationship--a relationship of "I ...

In this article we argue that philosophy can facilitate improvement in cross-disciplinary science. In particular, we discuss in detail the Toolbox Project, an effort in applied epistemology that deploys philosophical analysis for the purpose of enhancing collaborative, cross-disciplinary scientific research through improvements in cross-disciplinary communication. We begin by sketching the scie...

Part-of-speech (POS) tagging for English is often considered a solved problem, with accuracies for POS tagging the Penn Treebank of around 97%. However, POS tagging generally assumes that there is a large in-domain training set available, and that the domain is carefully edited written language. We investigate the performance of Markov model and maximum entropy POS taggers given a small data se...

Our overall program objective is to provide more natural ways for soldiers to interact and communicate with robots, much like how soldiers communicate with other soldiers today. We describe how the Wizard-of-Oz (WOz) method can be applied to multimodal human-robot dialogue in a collaborative exploration task. While the WOz method can help design robot behaviors, traditional approaches place the...

Human-robot collaboration may fail due to conflicts in beliefs or plans between cooperating partners, or due to robot errors. Dialogue is an intuitive way to resolve such conflicts due to miscommunication. The research demonstrated here explores the notion of using argumentation-based dialogue for human-robot interaction. The demonstration presents a proof-of-concept prototype of a logic-based ...