2014-11-06 Joyce Chai, Mediating Shared Basis towards Situated Dialogue
Channel: Yoav Artzi
Date: 12/11/2014

Talk @ UW NLP Seminar, 11/6/2014

Speaker: Joyce Chai (Michigan State University)
Title: Mediating Shared Basis towards Situated Dialogue

Abstract:
With the emergence of a new generation of cognitive robots, technology to enable situated dialogue has become increasingly important. As opposed to traditional spoken dialogue systems and multimodal conversational interfaces, situated dialogue has a unique characteristic of co-presence. Human partners and robots are co-present in a shared physical environment; however, they have mismatched capabilities in perceiving and interpreting the shared environment. Thus, their representations of the shared world are significantly misaligned, which makes it difficult for humans and robots to communicate with each other using language. To address this problem, we have conducted experiments on human-human communication, examined collaborative dialogue discourse, and developed approaches for language processing that take into account perceptual differences. In this talk, I will give an introduction to this research effort and present collaborative models for language interpretation and language generation to mediate shared basis in referential communication.  


Bio:
Joyce Chai is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University.  She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University in 1998. Prior to joining MSU in 2003, she was a Research Staff Member at IBMT. J. Watson Research Center. Her research interests include natural language processing, situated dialogue agents, information extraction and retrieval, and intelligent user interfaces. She was program co-chair for SIGDIAL 2011, IUI 2014, and currently serves as program co-chair for NAACL-HLT 2015. She received a National Science Foundation Career Award in 2004 and the Best Long Paper Award from the Annual Meeting of Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2010.