The role of natural language in a multimodal interface
UIST '92 Proceedings of the 5th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
Artificial Intelligence - Special volume on natural language processing
Building natural language generation systems
Building natural language generation systems
Partially observable Markov decision processes for spoken dialog systems
Computer Speech and Language
IJCAI'09 Proceedings of the 21st international jont conference on Artifical intelligence
Classical planning and causal implicatures
CONTEXT'11 Proceedings of the 7th international and interdisciplinary conference on Modeling and using context
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A person's choice of what to communicate and how to communicate it depends on the information he or she believes is shared with the audience. This presents a challenge for natural language interfaces, because it is hard for people to predict what information they share with the interface and how it will use this information to interpret their text. This is especially difficult for pragmatic-level assumptions supplied by the interpreter that go beyond the information in the surface text, because these assumptions are negotiated in dialogue and frequently revised or redacted. We have built a calendaring interface that allows users to communicate English event descriptions. This constrained task gives us a clear criteria for communication success and failure. Failures are opportunities to acquire and revise assumptions: to collect lexical and semantic knowledge from a variety of users. By lowering the interaction barrier so end users can contribute to the linguistic interpretation process, we can collect culture-specific lexical and semantic knowledge directly from the members of the cultural group who possess it. This knowledge is essential for the pragmatic task of deriving what a speaker meant from what they said. The goal of this research is to make the assumptions involved with interpreting natural language explicit to the user. Using a model of language generation and interpretation based on planning and plan recognition, we capture, through user contributions, word definitions and commonsense assumptions - and we represent both as belief-changing actions. Using visualizations and a direct manipulation interface, users can access the interpretation status, inspect which assumptions were made, and suggest or modify existing assumptions. With the aim of providing the functionally equivalent of the negotiation stage in interpersonal dialogue, we evaluate the interface by how it allows users to revise and extend assumptions toward successful interpretation.