Human-machine conversations to support mission-oriented information provision

  • Authors:
  • Alun Preece;Dave Braines;Diego Pizzocaro;Christos Parizas

  • Affiliations:
  • Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom;IBM United Kingdom Ltd, Winchester, United Kingdom;Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom;Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2nd ACM annual international workshop on Mission-oriented wireless sensor networking
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Mission-oriented sensor networks present challenging problems in terms of human-machine collaboration. Human users need to task the network to help them achieve mission objectives, while humans (sometimes the same individuals) are also sources of mission-critical information. We propose a natural language-based conversational approach to supporting human-machine working in mission-oriented sensor networks. We present a model for human-machine and machine-machine interactions in a realistic mission context, and evaluate the model using an existing surveillance mission scenario. The model supports the flow of conversations from full natural language to a form of Controlled Natural Language (CNL) amenable to machine processing and automated reasoning, including high-level information fusion tasks. We introduce a mechanism for presenting the gist of verbose CNL expressions in a more convenient form for human users. We show how the conversational interactions supported by the model include requests for expansions and explanations of machine-processed information.