Cognitive language engineering towards robust human-computer interaction

Intelligent information processing seems to be one of the most challenging task among those involved in human-computer interaction. A central issue is how to model the various types of interaction among artificial and natural entities at different levels of abstraction. On the one hand, models of interaction are required to better understand the communication phenomena. On the other, suitable languages and paradigms should provide powerful frameworks for developing computer-based applications. In this dissertation I focus on different aspects of the second problem, trying to develop a methodology for the design of interactive natural language applications (e.g. from question-answering to mixed-initiative dialogue). One of the main aspects I am concerned with in this work is the problem of their robustness. Several methods have been proposed for achieving robustness in natural language understanding, but these methods are sometimes hard to scale up or re-use in different applications. Moreover, they often concentrate on a single linguistic level of the processing rather than offering a global solution. I will set up a Language Engineering environment whose goal is to combine software engineering and cognitive aspects (e.g. aspects related to representation of a mental model of the speaker). Given its complexity, it is apparent that the problem can be solved only partially. I want to stress here that the main contribution of my work is a holistic perspective on the problem of natural language understanding. Rather than focusing on a particular aspect of natural language processing, I tried to benefit from the big amount of work that has been already done in Computational Linguistics and Computer Science merging different ideas and techniques. In the first part of the dissertation I explore the universe of Language Engineering in order to clarify how my contribution can be situated. After a survey on the state of the art on robust methods in analysis of natural language data, I focus on the role that Computational Logic plays in relating the syntactic and semantic analysis of natural language to its practical understanding within specific applications. Robustness is considered from two complementary perspectives, borrowing the terminology from modern software engineering: robustness "in the small" and robustness "in the large". The first perspective is discussed while presenting an application for the Interaction through Speech with Information Systems, where robust semantic parsing is used to extract queries from spoken natural language utterances.The second perspective is examplified by the re-engineering of an existing text analysis system using a new Language Engineering methodology: Agent-Oriented Language Engineering. In the second part of the thesis I discuss how cognitive aspects can be integrated into a Language Engineering environment leading to the notion of Cognitive Language Enginering. I tackle the difficult problem of robust dialogue management from both a cognitive and computational perspective. I propose two frameworks for the semantic representation and assimilation of information into the dialogue information state. The first framework allows us to represent and reason about the dynamic aspects of objects and events. The second framework is centered on the notion of mental space and it is used to build representations of the cognitive processing of information during communication.