Spoken dialogue systems allow users to interact with computer-based applications such as databases and expert systems by using natural spoken language. The origins of spoken dialogue systems can be traced back to Artificial Intelligence research in the 1950s concerned with developing conversational interfaces. However, it is only within the last decade or so, with major advances in speech technology, that large-scale working systems have been developed and, in some cases, introduced into commercial environments. As a result many major telecommunications and software companies have become aware of the potential for spoken dialogue technology to provide solutions in newly developing areas such as computer-telephony integration. Voice portals, which provide a speech-based interface between a telephone user and Web-based services, are the most recent application of spoken dialogue technology. This article describes the main components of the technology---speech recognition, language understanding, dialogue management, communication with an external source such as a database, language generation, speech synthesis---and shows how these component technologies can be integrated into a spoken dialogue system. The article describes in detail the methods that have been adopted in some well-known dialogue systems, explores different system architectures, considers issues of specification, design, and evaluation, reviews some currently available dialogue development toolkits, and outlines prospects for future development.

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Spoken Dialogue Technology

It represents a universally applicable attitude and skill set everyone, not just computer scientists, would be eager to learn and use.

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Computational Thinking 計算論的思考

Within the broad field of spoken dialogue systems, the application of machine-learning approaches to dialogue management strategy design is a rapidly growing research area. The main motivation is the hope of building systems that learn through trial-and-error interaction what constitutes a good dialogue strategy. Training of such systems could in theory be done using human users or using corpora of human–computer dialogue, but in practice the typically vast space of possible dialogue states and strategies cannot be explored without the use of automatic user simulation tools.This requirement for training statistical dialogue models has created an interesting new application area for predictive statistical user modelling and a variety of different techniques for simulating user behaviour have been presented in the literature ranging from simple Markov models to Bayesian networks. The development of reliable user simulation tools is critical to further progress on automatic dialogue management design but it holds many challenges, some of which have been encountered in other areas of current research on statistical user modelling, such as the problem of ‘concept drift’, the problem of combining content-based and collaboration-based modelling techniques, and user model evaluation. The latter topic is of particular interest, because simulation-based learning is currently one of the few applications of statistical user modelling that employs both direct ‘accuracy-based’ and indirect ‘utility-based’ evaluation techniques.In this paper, we briefly summarize the role of the dialogue manager in a spoken dialogue system, give a short introduction to reinforcement-learning of dialogue management strategies and review the literature on user modelling for simulation-based strategy learning. We further describe recent work on user model evaluation and discuss some of the current research issues in simulation-based learning from a user modelling perspective.

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A survey of statistical user simulation techniques for reinforcement-learning of dialogue management strategies

Several authors and studies highlight the benefits of the integration of Computer Science into K-12 education. Applications such as Scratch have been demonstrated to be effective in educational environments. The aim of this study is to assess the use of a Visual Programming Language using Scratch in classroom practice, analyzing the outcomes and attitudes of 107 primary school students from 5th to 6th grade in five different schools in Spain. The intervention takes place in two academic years analyzing the practice of integrating coding and visual blocks programming in sciences and arts. The "Computational concepts and computational practices" dimension details a quasi-experimental approach, which showed significant improvement regarding learning programming concepts, logic, and computational practices with an active approach. The "Learning processes and coding in primary education" dimension analyzes the practice of the experimental group through questionnaires and structured observation. In this pedagogical design, students interact and create their own content related to curricular areas with several advantages, such as motivation, fun, commitment, and enthusiasm, showing improvements related to computational thinking and computational practices. Understanding of computational concepts through an active approach, Project Based Learning, usefulness, motivation, and commitment underline the importance and effectiveness of implementing a Visual Programming Language from active methodologies in primary education. Due to the aforementioned benefits and positive results obtained in this research, it is recommended to implement a Visual Programming Language in educational settings in 5th and 6th grade in primary education through a cross-curricular implementation. Display Omitted We analyze the use of "Scratch" through statistical inference and case study.Pretest/posttest design (99%) Active approach and Computational Concepts.Active Learning, contents in art and History, usefulness and fun.Possibility of learning sequences, loops, parallelism and events.Project Based Learning enables an active approach, obtaining high values.

http://e-spacio.uned.es/fez/eserv/bibliuned:425-Jmsaez-0016/Saez_Lopez_Jose_M__Visual_programming_languages.pdf

Visual programming languages integrated across the curriculum in elementary school

Automated discourse generation using discourse structure relations

This paper presents a tripartite model of dialogue in which three different kinds of actions are modeled: domain actions, problem-solving actions, and discourse or communicative actions. We contend that our process model provides a more finely differentiated representation of user intentions than previous models; enables the incremental recognition of communicative actions that cannot be recognized from a single utterance alone; and accounts for implicit acceptance of a communicated proposition.

A tripartite plan-based model of dialogue

Negotiation is an important part of task-oriented expert-consultation dialogues. This paper presents a plan-based model for understanding cooperative negotiation subdialogues. Our system infers both the communicative actions that people pursue when speaking and the beliefs underlying these actions. Beliefs, and the strength of these beliefs, are recognized from the surface from of utterances, from discourse acts, and from the explicit and implicit acceptance of previous utterances. Our algorithm for recognizing discourse actions combines linguistic, world, and contextual knowledge in a unified framework. By combining these different knowledge sources, we are able to recognize complex discourse acts such as expressing doubt, to identify the relationship of utterances to one another, and to model negotiation subdialogues. Since negotiation is an integral part of multiagent activity, our process model addresses an important aspect of cooperative interaction and thus is a step toward an intelligent and robust natural language consultation system.

A process model for recognizing communicative acts and modeling negotiation subdialogues

The New Zealand Ministry of Education has recently released a new "Digital Technologies" proposal for delivering computing topics in the final three years of High Schools. The proposal aims to address a number of issues by offering topics that will be academically challenging for students, and provide them with a broader view of the kinds of advanced topics they might study beyond High School. The proposed structure includes having Digital Technologies as a separate area in the technology curriculum, and includes a strand called "Computer Science and Programming" that has sufficient coverage to communicate to students what the subject area is really about.This paper reviews the circumstances that led to this proposal, describes the international context (especially in the US) for High School computing curricula, and examines the published proposal in some detail. It also considers the issues that are likely to come up in the implementation of the proposal, and how they might be addressed.

Computer Science in New Zealand high schools

To encourage interest in computer science, we visited three fourth grade classes once a week for thirty minutes each (three content sessions and a pretest and post-test session) in March-April 2007 The basis for the activities was Computer Science Unplugged Pre and post tests indicate improved confidence and interest in Computer Science and Math

Computer science outreach in an elementary school

This paper presents a plan-based model that handles negotiation subdialogues by inferring both the communicative actions that people pursue when speaking and the beliefs underlying these actions. We contend that recognizing the complex discourse actions pursued in negotiation subdialogues (e.g., expressing doubt) requires both a multistrength belief model and a process model that combines different knowledge sources in a unified framework. We show how our model identifies the structure of negotiation subdialogues, including recognizing expressions of doubt, implicit acceptance of communicated propositions, and negotiation subdialogues embedded within other negotiation subdialogues.

Lynn Lambert

Papers

A tripartite plan-based model of dialogue

A process model for recognizing communicative acts and modeling negotiation subdialogues

Computer Science in New Zealand high schools

Computer science outreach in an elementary school

Modeling negotiation subdialogues