INDI: Informationsutbyte i dialog

Information Exchange in Dialogue

Participants

• Robin Cooper, Coordinator
• Peter Ljunglöf
• Elisabet Engdahl
• Jonathan Ginzburg, King's College, London (formerly Hebrew University, Jerusalem), Consultant
• Staffan Larsson

Short project description

The project aims to gain a deeper understanding of the detailed mechanisms involved in the exchange of information between participants in a natural language dialogue. Participants come to a dialogue with a certain ``information state'', that is to say, a collection of beliefs, knowledge, desires, goals etc. which are collectively known as ``attitudes'' that the dialogue participant has. A dialogue participant can express one or more of these attitudes in a natural language utterance and thereby succeed in modifying the information state of another dialogue participant. This process of modifying information states during the course of a conversation may be referred to as dialogue dynamics. The research involves developing formal analyses and matching them against real data from spoken language corpora. The investigation also has potential practical import in that there is considerable interest in building computer systems that can interact with humans in more natural dialogue than current technology allows. We have exploited this in other projects such as TRINDI, SIRIDUS, D'Homme and SDS.

Detailed description (Postscript)

Papers

1. Cooper, R. (1998): Mixing Situation Theory and Type Theory to Formalize Information States in Dialogue Exchanges. Proceedings of TWLT 13/Twendial '98: Formal Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. (Postscript)

2. Larsson, S. (1998): Questions Under Discussion and Dialogue Moves. Proceedings of TWLT 13/Twendial '98: Formal Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. (Postscript)

3. Cooper, R. (1998) Information States, Attitudes and Dependent Record Types. Proceedings of ITALLC98. (Postscript)

4. Engdahl, E. (1999) Integrating pragmatics into the grammar. In L.Mereu (ed) Boundaries of Morphology and Syntax, John Benjamins, Amsterdam. 175-194. ( Postscript)

5. Ginzburg, J. (1999) Fragmenting Meaning, Clarification Ellipsis and Nominal Anaphora. Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS-3), Tilburg University. 101-116. (Postscript)

6. Cooper, R. and S.Larsson (1999) Dialogue moves and information states. Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS-3), Tilburg University. 398-400.(extended abstract)

7. Bohlin, Peter and Staffan Larsson (1999) GoDiS and the Dialogue Move Engine Toolkit. In D.Traum (ed.) ACL '99 Demonstration Abstracts.

8. Bohlin, P., E.Engdahl, R.Cooper and S.Larsson (1999) Information States and Dialogue Move Engines. In Alexandersson, Jan (ed) IJCAI-99 Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems. Postscript. Revised version, to appear in Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (ETAI). Postscript.

9. Engdahl, Elisabet (1999) "Det var det ingen som ville" om spetsställningens form, funktion och restriktioner i svenska. Svenskans beskrivning 23, Lund University Press, 96-105.

10. Bohlin,Peter, Robin Cooper, Elisabet Engdahl and Staffan Larsson (1999): Accommodating Information States in Dialogue. Presented at the Third Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation, Batumi, September 12-16. To appear in the proceedings. (Postscript)

11. Ginzburg, Jonathan and Ivan A. Sag (1999) Constructional Ambiguity in Conversation. Proceedings from the 12th Amsterdam Colloquium. (Postscript)

12. Larsson, Staffan, Peter Ljunglöf, Robin Cooper, Elisabet Engdahl, Stina Ericsson (2000): GoDiS - An Accommodating Dialogue System. Proceedings of ANLP/NAACL-2000 Workshop on Conversational Systems. Postscript

13. Cooper, Robin, Elisabet Engdahl, Staffan Larsson, and Stina Ericsson (2000) Accommodating questions and the nature of QUD. Proceedings of GÖTALOG 2000, 57-61. Postscript
    

14. Larsson, Staffan (2000) From Manual Text to Instructional Dialogue: an Information State Approach.Proceedings of GÖTALOG 2000, 203-206. Postscript
    

15. Ljunglöf, Peter (2000) Formalizing the Dialogue Move Engine. Proceedings of GÖTALOG 2000, 207-210. Postscript
    

16. Larsson, Staffan and Robin Cooper (2000) An Information State Approach to Natural Interactive Dialogue. Proceedings of LREC-2000 workshop on Natural Interactive Dialogue, Athens. Postscript
    

17. Larsson, Staffan, Robin Cooper and Elisabet Engdahl (2000) Question Accommodation and Information States in Dialogue. Proceedings of the Third Workshop in Human-Computer Conversation, Bellagio. Postscript
    

18. Engdahl, Elisabet (to appear) The role of syntactic features in the analysis of dialogue. In C.Rohrer, A.Rossdeutscher and Hans Kamp (eds.) Linguistic Form and its Computation, CSLI. (Postscript, pdf)
    

19. Ginzburg, Jonathan and Robin Cooper (2001) Resolving Ellipsis in clarification. Proceedings of 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, CNRS, Toulouse, 236-243. (Postscript)

20. Ginzburg, Jonathan and Robin Cooper (in prep.) Clarification, Ellipsis and Utterance Representation. (Postscript)

Book

• Ginzburg, Jonathan and Ivan A. Sag (2000) Interrogative Investigations: the form, meaning, and use of English Interrogatives, 450 pages; CSLI Publications, Stanford, distributed by University of Chicago Press. (Contents)

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