Abstract
In this paper we target Natural Language Understanding in the context of Conversational Agents that answer questions about their topics of expertise, and have in their knowledge base question/answer pairs, limiting the understanding problem to the task of finding the question in the knowledge base that will trigger the most appropriate answer to a given (new) question. We implement such an agent and different state of the art techniques are tested, covering several paradigms, and moving from lab experiments to tests with real users. First, we test the implemented techniques in a corpus built by the agent’s developers, corresponding to the expected questions; then we test the same techniques in a corpus representing interactions between the agent and real users. Interestingly, results show that the best “lab” techniques are not necessarily the best for real scenarios, even if only in-domain questions are considered.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bernsen, N.O., Dybkjær, L.: Meet hans christian anderson. In: Proceedings of the Sixth SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, pp. 237–241 (2005)
Bernsen, N.O., Charfuelan, M., Corradini, A., Dybkjær, L., Hansen, T., Kiilerich, S., Kolodnytsky, M., Kupkin, D., Mehta, M.: Conversational H.C. Andersen first prototype description. In: ADS, pp. 305–308 (2004)
Bhagat, R., Leuski, A., Hovy, E.: Shallow semantic parsing despite little training data. In: Proc. ACL/SIGPARSE 9th Int. Workshop on Parsing Technologies (2005)
Bohus, D., Rudnicky, A.I.: Ravenclaw: Dialog management using hierarchical task decomposition and an expectation agenda, Phoenix, USA, pp. 4–7 (2003)
Chang, C.-C., Lin, C.-J.: LIBSVM: a library for support vector machines (2001)
Kopp, S., Gesellensetter, L., Krämer, N.C., Wachsmuth, I.: A Conversational Agent as Museum Guide – Design and Evaluation of a Real-World Application. In: Panayiotopoulos, T., Gratch, J., Aylett, R.S., Ballin, D., Olivier, P., Rist, T. (eds.) IVA 2005. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3661, pp. 329–343. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Leuski, A., Pair, J., Traum, D.R., McNerney, P.J., Georgiou, P.P., Patel, R.: How to talk to a hologram. In: Paris, C., Sidner, C.L. (eds.) IUI, pp. 360–362. ACM (2006)
Leuski, A., Traum, D.: NPCEditor: A Tool for Building Question-Answering Characters (2010)
Leuski, A., Traum, D.R.: A statistical approach for text processing in virtual humans, In: Proceedings of the 26th Army Science Conference (2008)
Leuski, A., Traum, D.R.: Npceditor: Creating virtual human dialogue using information retrieval techniques. AI Magazine, 242–256 (2011)
Mendes, A.C., Prada, R., Coheur, L.: Adapting a Virtual Agent to Users’ Vocabulary and Needs. In: Ruttkay, Z., Kipp, M., Nijholt, A., Vilhjálmsson, H.H. (eds.) IVA 2009. LNCS, vol. 5773, pp. 529–530. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Moreira, C., Mendes, A.C., Coheur, L., Martins, B.: Towards the Rapid Development of a Natural Language Understanding Module. In: Vilhjálmsson, H.H., Kopp, S., Marsella, S., Thórisson, K.R. (eds.) IVA 2011. LNCS, vol. 6895, pp. 309–315. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Thomas, D.P.: Affect-sensitive virtual standardized patient interface system. Clinical Technologies: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications 3 (2011)
Pfeiffer, T., Liguda, C., Wachsmuth, I.: Living with a virtual agent: Seven years with an embodied conversational agent at the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum. In: KK, pp. 273–297 (1995)
Rudnicky, A.: Xu W.: An agenda-based dialog management architecture for spoken language systems. In: IEEE ASRU Workshop, pp. 337–340 (1999)
Weizenbaum, J.: Eliza – a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM 9(1), 36–45 (1966)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mota, P., Coheur, L., Curto, S., Fialho, P. (2012). Natural Language Understanding: From Laboratory Predictions to Real Interactions. In: Sojka, P., Horák, A., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds) Text, Speech and Dialogue. TSD 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7499. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32790-2_78
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32790-2_78
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32789-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32790-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)