Springer, 2008. — 338 p. — (Text, Speech and Language Technology Series 39).This book edition highlights recent trends and important issues that still remain only partially solved or even unsolved within the broad field of discourse and dialogue. The field is discussed and illustrated both from an overall spoken (multimodal) dialogue system perspective as well as from a more component-related perspective. Issues discussed include, for example, discourse and dialogue modelling in research versus industrial spoken dialogue systems, evaluation, miscommunication and error handling, grounding, statistical and corpus-based approaches to discourse and dialogue modelling, data analysis, and corpus annotation and annotation tools.
We believe that jointly this collection of chapters provides a good picture of how far we are today within discourse and dialogue and of important challenges ahead. On this background we hope that computer scientists, engineers, and others who work in the broad area of discourse and dialogue, no matter if from an academic or industrial perspective, may benefit from the book and find it useful to their own work. Graduate students and Ph.D. students focusing on topics in discourse and dialogue may also find the book interesting and profit from reading it.
This book edition is based on a selected subset of papers from the successful 6th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue held in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2005 in conjunction with the 9th Eurospeech (Interspeech) conference. SIGdial is a special interest group on discourse and dialogue sponsored jointly by the two parent organisations ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) and ISCA (International Speech Communication Association). The annual two-day SIGdial workshops normally attract a considerable amount of papers. The workshop in 2005 attracted 80 submissions which is the highest submission rate to date for the SIGdial workshop series. Twentyeight papers were accepted for the workshop and of these 10 were invited for publication in this book along with a paper by an invited speaker, i.e. a total of 11 papers.
All workshop papers were extended and revised before they were submitted as book chapters. Each chapter has subsequently been reviewed by two external reviewers and further improved on the basis of their comments.Trends and Challenges in Discourse and Dialogue
Where Do We Go From Here?
Designing Speech-Controlled Media File Selection for Automotive Systems
A Virtual Human Dialogue Model for Non-Team Interaction
Evaluating Interactions with Spoken Dialogue Telephone Services
Handling Miscommunication: Why Bother?
Sorry, I Didn’t Catch That!
GALATEA: A Discourse Modeller Supporting Concept-Level Error Handling in Spoken Dialogue Systems
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes with Continuous Observations for Dialogue Management
Does This Answer Your Question?
Meeting Structure Annotation
Analyzing Dependencies between Student Certainness States and Tutor Responses in a Spoken Dialogue Corpus
