Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, December 20, 16:15, Building 17, Seminar Room

A Dialogue Model based on Collaborative Problem Solving

While there is great interest and activity in building spoken dialogue systems today, most applications involved very limited domains that require no significant reasoning. Our goal is to design and build systems that approach human performance in conversational interaction in deomains that require significant reasoning. We limit our study to `Practical dialogues': dialogues in which the conversants are cooperatively pursuing specific goals or tasks. These include planning (e.g., designing a kitchen), information retrieval (e.g., finding out the weather in New York), customer service (e.g., booking an airline flight), advice-giving (e.g., helping assemble some modular furniture) or crisis management (e.g., a 911 center assistant). In fact, our belief is that the class of practical dialogues includes most anything about which people might want to interact with a computer.

While each of these different genres of tasks require significantly different reasoning components and have different structures, we believe that we can develop an overall model of practical dialogue that enables us to build domain-independent systems that can relatively easily be adapted to different domains. The key is developing an abstract model of collaborative problem solving and interaction. I will describe our work so far and illustrate with examples from some systems we have built over the past five years.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova.