Articles

We describe an architecture for spoken dialogue interfaces to semi-autonomous systems that trans- forms speech signals through successive representa- tions of linguistic, dialogue, and domain knowledge. Each step produces an output, and a meta-output describing the transformation, with an executable program in a simple scripting language as the fi- nal …...

This paper describes MIMIC, an adaptive mixed initia- tive spoken dialogue system that provides movie show- time information. MIMIC improves upon previous dialogue systems in two respects. First, it employs initiative-oriented strategy adaptation to automatically adapt response generation strategies based on the cumu- lative effect of information dynamically extracted from …...

This paper introduces an approach to represent- ing the kinds of information that components in a natural language generation (NLG) sys- tem will need to communicate to one another. This information may be partial, may involve more than one level of analysis and may need to include information about the …...

This paper describes and evaluates a detector of presuppositions (DP) for survey questions. Incorrect presuppositions can make it difficult to answer a question correctly. Since they can be difficult to detect, DP is a useful tool for questionnaire designer. DP performs well using local characteristics of presuppositions. It reports the …...

This paper reports on a large-scale, end-to- end relation and event extraction system. At present, the system extracts a total of 100 types of relations and events, which represents a much wider coverage than is typical of extraction systems. The system consists of three specialized pattem-based tagging modules, a high-precision …...

We describe Talk'n'Travel, a spoken dialogue language system for making air travel plans over the telephone. Talk'n'Travel is a fully conversational, mixed-initiative system that allows the user to specify the constraints on his travel plan in arbitrary order, ask questions, etc., in general spoken English. The system operates according to …...

In this paper we describe an implemented framework for developing monolingual or multilingual natural language generation (NLG) applications and machine translation (MT) applications. The framework demonstrates a uniform approach to generation and transfer based on declarative lexico-structural transformations of dependency structures of syntactic or conceptual levels ("uniform lexico-structural processing"). We …...

This paper describes an application of APE (the Atlas Planning Engine), an integrated planning and execution system at the heart of the Atlas dialogue management system. APE controls a mixed- initiative dialogue between a human user and a host system, where turns in the 'conversation' may include graphical actions and/or …...

This paper proposes a way to improve the trans- lation quality by using information on dialogue participants that is easily obtained from out- side the translation component. We incorpo- rated information on participants' social roles and genders into transfer rules and dictionary entries. An experiment with 23 unseen dia- logues …...

We report on a method for utilising corpora col- lected in natural settings. It is based on distilling (re-writing) natural dialogues to elicit the type of dialogue that would occur if one the dialogue par- ticipants was a computer instead of a human. The method is a complement to other …...

This paper describes a system that provides customer service by allowing users to retrieve identification numbers of parts for medical systems using spoken natural language dialogue. The paper also presents an evaluation of the system which shows that the system successfully retrieves the identification numbers of approximately 80% of the …...

A major obstacle to the construction of a probabilis- tic translation model is the lack of large parallel cor- pora. In this paper we first describe a parallel text mining system that finds parallel texts automatically on the Web. The generated Chinese-English paral- lel corpus is used to train a …...

Cross-Language Multimedia Information Retrieval Sharon Flank emotion, Inc. 2600 Park Tower Dr., Vienna, VA 22180 USA sharon.flank@emotion.com Simple measures can achieve high-accuracy cross-language retrieval in carefully chosen applications. Image retrieval is one of those applications, with results ranging from 68% of human translator performance for German, to 100% for French. …...

The paper describes a natural language based expert system route advisor for the public bus transport in Trondheim, Norway. The system is available on the Internet,and has been intstalled at the bus com- pany's web server since the beginning of 1999. The system is bilingual, relying on an internal language …...

Using examples of the transfer-based MT system between Czech and Russian RUSLAN and the word-for-word MT system with morphological disambiguation between Czech and Slovak (~ESILKO we argue that for really close languages it is possible to obtain better translation quality by means of simpler methods. The problem of translation to …...

This paper compares the efficiency of using a standard direct-manipulation graphical user interface (GUI) with that of using the QuickSet pen/voice multimodal interface for supporting a military task. In this task, a user places military units and control measures (e.g., various types of lines, obstacles, objectives) on a map. Four …...

This paper explores the usefulness of a technique from software engineering, namely code instrumen- tation, for the development of large-scale natural language grammars. Information about the usage of grammar rules in test sentences is used to detect untested rules, redundant test sentences, and likely causes of overgeneration. Results show that …...

In this paper, we analyze the performance of name finding in the context of a variety of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and in the context of one optical character recognition (OCR) system. We explore the effects of word error rate from ASR and OCR, performance as a function of …...

In this paper we propose a method to compositionally interpret tenses of Japanese complex sen- tences on the basis of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Discourse Representation The- ory. In this approach, each of the tense-bearing forms such as main verbs and the past auxiliary is given a single temporal …...

This paper deals with alternative questions in English, and proposes an analysis employing an alternative operator. I claim that the alternative question interpretation is not obtained by such syntactic processes as movement or gapping, but by scoping of an alternative operator that originates from the conjunction or. Accordingly, while the …...