Recent Trends in Discourse and Dialogue

This book edition highlights recent trends and important issues that still remain only partially solved or even unsolved within the broad ?eld of discourse and dialogue. The ?eld is discussed and illustrated both from an overall spoken (multimodal) dialogue system perspective as well as from a more compone- related perspective. Issues discussed include, for example, discourse and dialogue modelling in research versus industrial spoken dialogue systems, evaluation, miscommunication and error handling, grounding, statistical and corpus-based approaches to discourse and dialogue modelling, data analysis, and corpus annotation and annotation tools. We believe that jointly this collection of chapters provides a good picture of how far we are today within discourse and dialogue and of important ch- lenges ahead. On this background we hope that computer scientists, engineers, and others who work in the broad area of discourse and dialogue, no matter if from an academic or industrial perspective, may bene?t from the book and ?nd it useful to their own work. Graduate students and Ph.D. students focusing on topics in discourse and dialogue may also ?nd the book interesting and pro?t from reading it. This book edition is based on a selected subset of papers from the successful 6th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue held in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2005 in conjunction with the 9th Eurospeech (Interspeech) conf- ence. SIGdial is a special interest group on discourse and dialogue sponsored jointly by the two parent organisations ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) and ISCA (International Speech Communication Association).

Preface.- Contributing Authors.- Trends and Challenges in Discourse and Dialogue by Laila Dybkjær and Wolfgang Minker.- Chapter 1 Where Do We Go From Here? By Roberto Pieraccini and Juan M. Huerta.- Chapter 2 Designing Speech-controlled Media File Selection for Automotive Systems by Yu-Fang H.Wang and Stefan W. Hamerich.- Chapter 3 A Virtual Human Dialogue Model for Non-Team Interaction by David Traum, William Swartout, Jonathan Gratch and Stacy Marsella.- Chapter 4 Evaluating Interactions with Spoken Dialogue Telephone Services by Sebastian Möller.- Chapter 5 Handling Miscommunication: Why Bother? By Michael McTear.- Chapter 6 Sorry I Didn-t Catch That! By Dan Bohus and Alexander I. Rudnicky.-Chapter 7 GALATEA: A Discourse Modeller Supporting Concept-Level Error Handling in Spoken Dialogue Systems by Gabriel Skantze.- Chapter 8 Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes with Continuous Observations for Dialogue Management by Jason D. Williams, Pascal Poupart and Steve Young.- Chapter 9 Does This Answer Your Question? By Matthias Denecke and Norihito Yasuda.- Chapter 10 Meeting Structure Annotation by Alexander Gruenstein, John Niekrasz and Matthew Purver.- Chapter 11 Analyzing Dependencies between Student Certainness States and Tutor Responses in a Spoken Dialogue Corpus by Kate Forbes-Riley and Diane J. Litman.-Abbreviations.- Index.