Discourse Processing of Dialogues with Multiple Threads

@article{Ros1995DiscoursePO,
  title={Discourse Processing of Dialogues with Multiple Threads},
  author={Carolyn Penstein Ros{\'e} and Barbara Maria Di Eugenio and Lori S. Levin and Carol Van Ess-Dykema},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={1995},
  volume={cmp-lg/9504025}
}
In this paper we will present our ongoing work on a plan-based discourse processor developed in the context of the Enthusiast Spanish to English translation system as part of the JANUS multi-lingual speech-to-speech translation system. We will demonstrate that theories of discourse which postulate a strict tree structure of discourse on either the intentional or attentional level are not totally adequate for handling spontaneous dialogues. We will present our extension to this approach along… 
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This Chapter explains how to build an invariant discourse tree for a corpus of texts to arrange a chatbot-facilitated navigation through this corpus, and introduces imaginary discourse tree to address a problem of involving background knowledge on demand, answering questions.

Dialogue processing in a conversational speech translation system

This paper describes how the JANUS multi-lingual speech-to-speech translation system addresses problems that arise in discourse processing of spontaneous speech, and describes robust parsers, procedures for segmenting long utterances, and two approaches to discourse processing that attempt to deal with ambiguity and cumulative error.

Applications of discourse structure for spoken dialogue systems

This research investigates the utility of discourse structure for spoken dialogue systems in more complex domains, e.g. tutoring, and finds statistical dependencies between discourse structure transitions and two dialogue phenomena which allow us to speculate where and why these dialogue phenomena occur and to better understand system behavior.

Conventions in human-human multi-threaded dialogues: a preliminary study

It is found that some subjects are able to vary where they switch depending on how urgent the interrupting task is, and they switched at the end of a discourse segment, which is hypothesized to be less disruptive to the interrupted task when it is later resumed.

multithreaded context for robust conversational interfaces: Context-sensitive speech recognition and interpretation of corrective fragments

It is shown that by using context-sensitive recognition based on the predicted type of the user's next dialogue move, a more flexible dialogue system can also exhibit an improvement in speech recognition performance.

Coherence maintenance in human-machine dialogue: indirect antecedents and ellipses

A heuristic algorithm for detection of the indirect antecedents for dialogue phrases based on the use of a dictionary of prototypic scenarios associated with each headword, as well as of a thesaurus of the standard type is presented.

Conversational Actions and Discourse Situations

We use the idea that actions performed in a conversation become part of the common ground as the basis for a model of context that reconciles in a general and systematic fashion the differences…

Input Segmentation of Spontaneous Speech in JANUS: A Speech-to-speech Translation System

This paper describes how multi-level segmentation of single utterance turns improves translation quality and facilitates accurate translation in the Janus speech-to-speech translation system.

Modeling Task-Oriented Dialogue

The use of a finite state machine (FSM) to disambiguate speech acts in a machinetranslation system and Evaluation results show that the discourse processor is able todisambiguates and improve the quality of thedialogue translation.

Using Discourse Predictions for Ambiguity Resolution

This paper discusses how discourse predictions along with non context-based predictions to the problem of parse disambiguation in Enthusiast, a Spanish-to-English translation system, and evaluates extensions to the plan-based discourse processor in order to make this possible.
...

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