Adaptive dialogue management using intent clustering and fuzzy rules

Conversational systems have become an element of everyday life for billions of users who use speech‐based interfaces to services, engage with personal digital assistants on smartphones, social media chatbots, or smart speakers. One of the most complex tasks in the development of these systems is to design the dialogue model, the logic that provided a user input selects the next answer. The dialogue model must also consider mechanisms to adapt the response of the system and the interaction style according to different groups and user profiles. Rule‐based systems are difficult to adapt to phenomena that were not taken into consideration at design‐time. However, many of the systems that are commercially available are based on rules, and so are the most widespread tools for the development of chatbots and speech interfaces. In this article, we present a proposal to: (a) automatically generate the dialogue rules from a dialogue corpus through the use of evolving algorithms, (b) adapt the rules according to the detected user intention. We have evaluated our proposal with several conversational systems of different application domains, from which our approach provided an efficient way for adapting a set of dialogue rules considering user utterance clusters.     

Combining interaction and context design to support collaborative argumentation using a tool for synchronous CMC

Abstract Empirical studies and theory suggest that educational dialogue can be used to support learners in the development of reasoning, critical thinking and argumentation. This paper presents an educational design for synchronous online peer discussion that guides student dialogue in ways that lead to improved argumentation and collaborative knowledge development. This design includes a mediating interface – or tool, linked to a broader set of online educational activities – a designed local context, where the latter aims to provide conditions that support argumentation. The approach is based on collaborative working and dialogue game approaches to discussion. Preliminary findings with UK Open University students showed the argumentation process was more coherent, varied, deeper and extended when using our interaction design compared with the use of a simple unstructured interface.     

用于辩证分析的多方对话协议

在基于辩论的多agent系统研究中,agent之间的对话博弈一般是双方的,然而现实中的辩论却常常涉及到多方参与者,如何实现多agent系统的多方对话博弈是当前的研究热点之一。用于多方论据博弈的辩证分析模型(DAM-MAG)是一种借鉴中国武术擂台比武思想,将多方对话博弈转化为若干个双方对话博弈的理论模型。DAM-MAG的难点在于多方对话博弈协议的设计和实现。为此,基于该理论模型提出了一种多方对话博弈协议。该协议提供了通过双方对话博弈来解决多方对话博弈问题的方法,为解决多agent系统的多方对话博弈提供了新的途径。     

A Dialogue Game Protocol for Agent Purchase Negotiations

We propose a dialogue game protocol for purchase negotiation dialogues which identifies appropriate speech acts, defines constraints on their utterances, and specifies the different sub-tasks agents need to perform in order to engage in dialogues according to this protocol. Our formalism combines a dialogue game similar to those in the philosophy of argumentation with a model of rational consumer purchase decision behaviour adopted from marketing theory. In addition to the dialogue game protocol, we present a portfolio of decision mechanisms for the participating agents engaged in the dialogue and use these to provide our formalism with an operational semantics. We show that these decision mechanisms are sufficient to generate automated purchase decision dialogues between autonomous software agents interacting according to our proposed dialogue game protocol.     

Partial information basis for agent-based collaborative dialogue

We propose a partial information state-based framework for collaborative dialogue and argument between agents. We employ a three-valued based nonmonotonic logic, NML3, for representing and reasoning about Partial Information States (PIS). NML3 formalizes some aspects of revisable reasoning and it is sound and complete. Within the framework of NML3, we present a formalization of some basic dialogue moves and the rules of protocols of some types of dialogue. The rules of a protocol are nonmonotonic in the sense that the set of propositions to which an agent is committed and the validity of moves vary from one move to another. The use of PIS allows an agent to expand consistently its viewpoint with some of the propositions to which another agent, involved in a dialogue, is overtly committed. A proof method for the logic NML3 has been successfully implemented as an automatic theorem prover. We show, via some examples, that the tableau method employed to implement the theorem prover allows an agent, absolute access to every stage of a proof process. This access is useful for constructive argumentation and for finding cooperative and/or informative answers.     

Dialogue Coherence: A Generation Framework

This paper presents a framework for the generation of coherent elementary conversational sequences at the speech act level. We will embrace the notion of a cooperative dialogue game in which two players produce speech acts to transfer relevant information with respect to their commitments. Central to the approach is that participants try to achieve some sort of balanced cognitive state as a result of speech act generation and interpretation. Cognitive states of the participants change as a result of the interpretation of speech acts and these changes provoke the production of a subsequent speech act. Describing the properties and the dynamics of the mental constructs that constitute the participants’ cognitive states, such as beliefs and commitments, in relation to the various dialogue contributions is an essential aspect of the game. Although simple in its basic form, the framework enables us to produce abstract conversations with some properties that agree strikingly with coherence structures found in, for instance, Conversation Analysis.     

Evaluating Plan Recognition Systems: Three Properties of a Good Explanation

Plan recognition in a dialogue system is the process of explaining why an utterance was made, in terms of the plans and goals that its speaker was pursuing in making the utterance. I present a theory of how such an explanation of an utterance may be judged as to its merits as an explanation. I propose three criteria for making such judgments: applicability, grounding, and completeness. The first criterion is the applicability of the explanation to the needs of the system that will use it. The second criterion is the grounding of the explanation in what is already known of the speaker and of the dialogue. Finally, the third criterion is the completeness of the explanation's coverage of the goals that motivated the production of the utterance. An explanation of an utterance is a good explanation of that utterance to the extent that it meets these three criteria. In addition to forming the basis of a method for evaluating the merit of an explanation, these criteria are useful in designing and evaluating a plan recognition algorithm and its associated knowledge base.     

Dialogue Games for Inconsistent and Biased Information

In this article, a dialogue game is presented in which coherent conversational sequences with inconsistent and biased information are described at the speech act level. Inconsistent and biased information is represented with bilattice structures, and based on these bilattice structures, a multi-valued logic is defined that makes it possible to describe a dialogue game in which agents can communicate about their cognitive states with inconsistent and biased information. A dialogue game is formalized by, first, defining the agent's cognitive state as a set of multi-valued theories, second, by defining the dialogue rules that prescribe permissible communicative acts based on the agent's cognitive state, and last, by defining update rules that change the agent's cognitive state as a result of communicative acts. We show that an example dialogue with inconsistent and biased information can be derived from our dialogue game.     

Dialogue as a basis for construction of speech systems

The structure of speech dialogue systems is analyzed. It is shown that the creation of speech recognition and synthesis systems is connected with the solution of direct and inverse problems as applied to the organization of speech dialogue. Attention is paid to the multilevel hierarchical organization of speech dialogue systems in which the interaction between recognition and synthesis channels is realized through a common knowledgebase. A generalized structure of data representation at different hierarchy levels is analyzed, and the hierarchy of qualities determining properties of a dialogue system is considered. __________ Translated from Kibernetika i Sistemnyi Analiz, No. 2, pp. 30–41, March–April 2008.     

Specification and execution of composite trading activities

With the growing number of trading opportunities available online, software tools designed to act on behalf of human traders are increasingly being used to automate trading activities. The next logical step in this evolution is the automation of composite trading activities designed to fulfill complex user goals and requirements. In this paper, we describe a model for specifying composite trading activities involving concurrent and interrelated negotiations with multiple parties and heterogeneous protocols. The model supports the specification of several types of constraints, such as the number of required successful negotiations, the limit price for the items to be traded, and the temporal constraints imposed by all trading parties. In order to guide the execution of the trading activities, we describe a novel planning and execution model for composite trading activities which is designed to maximize the expected utility of the user.     

DMS—A system for defining and managing human-computer dialogues

As the complexity of human-computer interfaces increases, those who use such interfaces as well as those responsible for their design have recognized an urgent need for substantive research in the human factors of software development. Because of the magnitude of the task of producing software for human-computer interfaces, appropriate tools are needed for defining and improving such interfaces, both in research and in production environments. DMS (dialogue management system) is a complete system for defining, modifying, simulating, executing, and monitoring human-computer dialogues. It is based upon the hypotheses that: (1) dialogue software should be designed separately from the code that implements the computational parts of an application, and (2) different roles are defined for the dialogue author and the programmer to achieve that goal. This paper discusses several of the technical aspects underlying the design of DMS.     

用于辩证分析的多Agent辩论对话系统MAS-Arguing的设计与实现

多方对话博弈是当前多Agent辩论技术研究的难点.本文基于辩论理论的辩证语义,提出一种用于多方论据博弈的辩证分析模型DAM-MAG,并设计和实现了基于该模型的多Agent辩论对话系统MAS-Arguing,证明了DAM-MAG模型在技术上的可行性.为了多方对话博弈易于实现,MAS-Arguing引入辩论擂台管理Agent,负责协调和监控多个辩论Agent之间的角色转换和论据博弈.本文主要从体系结构、通信语言、多方对话协议和承诺规则等方面说明了MAS -Arguing系统的设计与实现.     

Evolution of a participatory GIS

Participatory spatial planning and decision making requires a combination of software tools for group decision support, individual decision support and geographic analysis and presentation. This article presents a respective approach that integrates two software tools which were originally developed independently. One tool, Dito, is a Java application for the World Wide Web designed to facilitate structured argumentation and discourses. The other tool, CommonGIS, provides Java-based web-enabled services for the interactive, explorative generation and analysis of thematic maps, and it also supports multi-criteria decision making. The evolution of the integrated system is reviewed from first experiments in 2001, the resulting requirements and a succession of prototypes up to the latest solution. The focus of the article lies in the design of this solution.     

面向虚实融合的人机交互

面向虚实融合的人机交互涉及计算机科学、认知心理学、人机工程学、多媒体技术和虚拟现实等领域，旨在提高人机交互的效率，同时响应人类认知与情感的需求，在办公教育、机器人和虚拟/增强现实设备中都有广泛应用。本文从人机交互涉及感知计算、人与机器人交互及协同、个性化人机对话和数据可视化等4个维度系统阐述面向虚实融合人机交互的发展现状。对国内外研究现状进行对比，展望未来的发展趋势。本文认为兼具可迁移与个性化的感知计算、具备用户行为深度理解的人机协同、用户自适应的对话系统等是本领域的重要研究方向。     

CONVERSATION ACTS IN TASK-ORIENTED SPOKEN DIALOGUE

A linguistic form's compositional, timeless meaning can be surrounded or even contradicted by various social, aesthetic, or analogistic companion meanings. This paper addresses a series of problems in the structure of spoken language discourse, including turn-taking and grounding . It views these processes as composed of fine-grained actions, which resemble speech acts both in resulting from a computational mechanism of planning and in having a rich relationship to the specific linguistic features which serve to indicate their presence. The resulting notion of Conversation Acts is more general than speech act theory, encompassing not only the traditional speech acts but turn-taking, grounding, and higher-level argumentation acts as well. Furthermore, the traditional speech acts in this scheme become fully joint actions, whose successful performance requires full listener participation. This paper presents a detailed analysis of spoken language dialogue. It shows the role of each class of conversation acts in discourse structure, and discusses how each class can be processed and recognized. Conversation acts, it will be seen, better account for the success of conversation than speech act theory alone. They also provide a pragmatic view of meaning in which the literal/non-literal distinction is simply irrelevant.     

Exploring Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Using Computer Dialogue Simulation

This paper experimentally shows that mixed-initiative dialogue is not always more efficient than non-mixed initiative dialogue in route finding tasks. Based on the dialogue model proposed in Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis a lá the Birmingham school and Whittaker and Stenton's definition of initiative, we implement dialogue systems and obtain experimental results by making the systems interact with each other. Across a variety of instantiations of the dialogue model, the results show that with easy problems, the efficiency of mixed-initiative dialogue is a little better than or equal to that of non-mixed-initiative dialogue, while with difficult problems mixed-initiative dialogue is less efficient than non-mixed- initiative dialogue.     

A robust system for human-machine dialogue in telephony-based applications

This paper presents a real-time system for human-machine spoken dialogue on the telephone in task-oriented domains. The system has been tested in a large trial with inexperienced users and it has proved robust enough to allow spontaneous interactions even for people with poor recognition performance. The robust behaviour of the system has been achieved by combining the use of specific language models during the recognition phase of analysis, the tolerance toward spontaneous speech phenomena, the activity of a robust parser, and the use of pragmatic-based dialogue knowledge. This integration of the different modules allows the system to deal with partial or total breakdowns at other levels of analysis. We report the field trial data of the system with respect to speech recognition metrics of word accuracy and sentence understanding rate, time-to-completion, time-to-acquisition of crucial parameters, and degree of success of the interactions in providing the speakers with the information they required. The evaluation data show that most of the subjects were able to interact fruitfully with the system. These results suggest that the design choices made to achieve robust behaviour are a promising way to create usable spoken language telephone systems.