Course Description

This course will present an overview of some of the most popular approaches to dialogue system organization. We will briefly survey some prominent dialogue domains and systems to engage in dialogue within those domains. We will go over the different functional components of a dialogue system and some different approaches to provide that functionality. Finally, we will focus on the dialogue management component, and discuss different techniques for dialogue manager, including keyword, IR-inspired techniques, finite state systems, frame based, plan- and agent-based, and information-state based methods.

Presenter

Dr David Traum

Presenter Biography

David Traum, PhD, is a research scientist at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), and a research assistant professor in the Computer Science Department, both at the University of Southern California. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Rochester in 1994. His research focuses on collaboration and dialogue communication between human and artificial agents. He has engaged in theoretical, implementational, and empirical approaches to the problem, studying human-human natural language and multi-modal dialogue, as well as building a number of dialogue systems to communicate with human users. Dr Traum leads the natural language dialogue group at ICT, which collaborates with other groups on research and development of virtual humans. Dr. Traum is author of over 150 technical articles, has served on many conference program committees, and is currently the president emeritus of SIGDIAL, the international special interest group in discourse and dialogue.