Center for Spoken Language Understanding,
Oregon Graduate Institute,
P.O. Box 91000,
Portland, OR, 97291-1000
Novick, D., and Ward, K. (1995). The effect of context on the intelligibility of dialogue, Eurospeech'95, Madrid, Spain, September, 1995, 1235-1238.
Novick, D., and Hansen, B. (1995, invited). Mutuality strategies for reference in task-oriented dialogue, Twente Workshop on Language Technology 9 (TWLT9), Enschede, The Netherlands, June, 1995, 83-93.
Sutton, S., Hansen, B., Lander, T., Novick, D., and Cole, R. (1995). Evaluating the effectiveness of dialogue for an automated spoken questionnaire. Technical Report CSE 95-012, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology.
Ward, K., and Novick, D. (1995). Prosodic cues to word usage, Proceedings of ICASSP-95, Detroit, MI, May, 1995, 620-623.
Ward, K., and Novick, D. (1995). Integrating multiple cues for spoken-language understanding, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'95), Denver, CO, May, 1995.
Ward, K., and Novick, D. (1994). On the need for a theory of knowledge sources for spoken-language understanding, Working Notes of the AAAI-94 Workshop on Integration of Natural Language and Speech Processing, Seattle, WA, July, 1994, 23-30.
Foundations of the research include work on mutual knowledge and control in conversation. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) described a model of turn-taking in conversation that defined this area of inquiry. The notion of mutual knowledge was significantly developed by Clark and Marshall (1981), who used co-presence heuristics to attack the thorny problem of infinite regress in simple modal logic representations of conversational understanding. Key models of conversational structure based on mutual knowledge and confirmation include Grosz and Sidner's (1986) focus model and Clark and Schaefer's (1987, 1989) model of contribution trees defined by patterns of presentation and acceptance.
A significant aspect of this research area involves modeling and simulating conversations, especially with respect to conversational control. The first known simulation of conversation by computational agents was reported by Power (1979). In this work, a pair of agents named John and Mary conversed in simple English about opening a door and moving between rooms; conversational turn-taking was controlled by the system in which the agents were implemented. In Novick (1988, 1991), two agents conversed using speech acts, reproducing human conversations in a laboratory-based "letter sequence" task. Subsequently, Traum and Hinkelman (1992), then both students of Allen at Rochester, also used agents to simulate conversations in a laboratory-based "trains" domain. The first replication of a naturally occurring conversation was reported by Novick and Ward (1993).
Clark, H. H., and Schaefer, E. F. (1987). Collaborating on contributions to conversations. Language and Cognitive Processes, 2, 19-41.
Clark, H.H., and Schaefer, E. F. (1989). Contributing to discourse. Cognitive Science, 13(2) pp. 259-294.
Grosz, B. J., and Sidner, C. L. (1986). Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 12, 175-204.
Novick, D. G. (1988). Proceedings of Control of mixed-initiative discourse through meta-locutionary acts: A computational model. Technical Report CIS-TR-88-18, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon.
Novick, D. (1991). Controlling interaction with meta-acts (refereed poster). Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'91), New Orleans, LA, May, 1991.
Novick, D., and Ward, K. (1993). Mutual beliefs of multiple conversants: A computational model of collaboration in air traffic control. Proceedings of AAAI'93, Washington, DC, July, 1993, 196-201.
Power, R. (1979). The organization of purposeful dialogues. Linguistics, 17, 107-153.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language, 50, 696-735.
Traum, D., and Hinkelman, E. (1992). Conversation acts in task-oriented spoken dialogue. Computational Intelligence, 8(3).