COSC6330.03 Computational Pragmatics

COSC6330.03 Computational Pragmatics (Winter 2006)

Calendar Course Description

Many interactive systems strive to afford the same mechanisms to human users that are used in face-to-face conversation. This course examines the formal models and computational techniques that concern the pragmatics of language use that such systems employ.

Expanded course description below

For a course with complementary material, see COSC6328.3 Speech and Language Processing

Instructor

Professor Melanie Baljko
Office hours: Thursday, 4-5:30pm or by appointment, CSEB2028
Email: mb [at] cs [dot] yorku [dot] ca
All questions/comments are welcome.

Course Information

Winter 2006 Term (January 4-April 4):

Tuesdays 14:30-16:00, Bethune College, Room 325
Thursdays 14:30-16:00, Stong College Room 223

Auditors are welcome.

Course Structure

10% - Class discussion. Contributions to be in the form of questions or comments.
30% - Summary. 2-page summary to be prepared for each student-presented paper. To be submitted electronically (preferably in pdf format) by the start of class. Number of precis due depends on the number of student-presented papers (to be determined)
30% - Presentation(s). Each student will present 1 or 2 papers (depending on number of number of students enrolled). Sign-up for presentations will be done following the presentation of the first module (which will be presented by the instructor). More information here
30% - Project. A survey paper or an implementation, topic to be discussed with the instructor. Type and topic of project to be mutually agreed-upon by Friday, Feb 3.

The schedule below will be subject to frequent revisions.

Papers to be presented by students are marked with an asterisk (*)

Lecture	Topic	Readings	Presenter
Lecture 1 Thurs, Jan 5	Course Intro and Overview
Lectures 2-5 Tues, Jan 10- Tues Jan 17 Class cancelled on Thurs Jan 19	Module 1: Elemental Constructs	Ch. 18-19, Jurafsky and Martin, 2000.	Instructor
Lectures 6-9 Tues Jan 24- Thurs Feb 2	Module 2: Structure of Text	(*)Barbara Grosz and Julia Hirschberg Some intonational characteristics of discourse. Proceeding of the ICSLP, 1992.[PS]	Tsirlin
		(*)Jane Morris and Graeme Hirst Lexical Cohesion Computed by Thesaural Relations as an Indicator of the Structure of Text . Computational Linguistics 17(1), pp. 21-48, 1991.[PDF]	Vazquez-Abrams
		(*)Marti Hearst Multi-paragraph segmentation of expository text Proceedings of the ACL, pp. 9-16, 1994.[PDF]	Dadgari
		(*)Daniel Marcu Building Up Rhetorical Structure Trees Proceeding of the AAAI, 1996[PDF]	Tam
Lectures 10-12 Tues, Feb 07- Thurs Feb 23	Module 3: Structure of Conversation	Overview	Instructor
		()Paek, T and Horvitz, E. Conversation as Action Under Uncertainty. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-2000)*, 2000. pp. 455-464.[PDF]	Zaman
		(*)Michel Galley, Kathleen McKeown, Eric Fosler-Lussier and Hongyan Jing Discourse Segmentation of Multi-Party Conversation Proceedings of the ACL, 2003.[PDF]	Instructor

Lectures 13-15 Tues Feb 28- Thurs Mar 2	Module 4: Structure of quasi-conversational exchanges
		Tues, Feb 28 (*)D. J. Litman, M. A. Walker and M. S. Kearns Automatic Detection of Poor Speech Recognition at the Dialogue Level Proceedings of ACL, 1999[PDF]	Instructor
		Thurs, Mar 2 ()A. L. Gorin, G. Riccardi and J. H. Wright. How May I Help You?* Speech Communication, 23 (1/2), 113-127, 1997[PDF] (access required via York Library eResources)	Phillips

Lectures 16-18 Tues Mar 7- Tues Mar 14	Module 5: Pragmatics of Embodiment	Tues, Mar 7 Overview (Readings, if any, TBA)	Instructor
		Thurs, Mar 9 (*)Cassell, J. Embodied Conversational Interface Agents. Communications of the ACM, 43(4):70-78, 2000.[PDF] (access required via York Library eResources)	Gill
		Tues, Mar 14 (*)Yukiko Nakano; Gabe Reinstein; Tom Stocky; Justine Cassell. Toward a Model of Face-to-Face Grounding. Proceedings of ACL, 2003. [PDF]	Hu

Lectures 19-21 Thurs Mar 16- Thurs Mar 23	Module 6: Human Acquisition of Pragmatic Processes	Thurs, Mar 16 Overview (Readings, if any, TBA)	Instructor
		Tues, Mar 21 (*)J Siskind. A Computational Study of Cross-Situational Techniques for Learning Word-to-Meaning Mappings. [PDF]	Ramay
		Thurs, Mar 23 (*)P Gorniak, D Roy. Grounded semantic composition for visual scenes. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2004[PDF]	Instructor

Lectures 22-24 Tues, Mar 28 - Tues Apr 4	Module 7: Communication Disorders	Tues, Mar 28 Overview (Readings, if any, TBA)	Instructor
		Thurs, Mar 30 (*)Todman and Alm. Modelling conversational pragmatics in communication aids. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(4):523-538, 2003.[PDF] (access required via York Library eResources)	Kulikov
		Tues, Apr 4 (*)KF McCoy, CA Pennington, A Luberoff Badman. Compansion: From research prototype to practical integration. Natural Language Engineering, 4(1):73-95, 2000[PDF]	tbd

Expanded Course Description

Many interactive systems attempt to make use of the same mechanisms that are used by humans in face-to-face conversation. Conversation, which is but one of several "forums of language use", is characterized by the free exchange of conversational turns. Any interactive system must make use of a mechanism whereby the system's output and the system user's input are structured and interleaved; moreover, the mechanisms used in human conversational turn-taking are often held as an ideal, since they are intuitive and have already been mastered by human users. This course introduces the primary models of conversational turn-taking and examines several computational techniques to track and to model automatically the interaction's status with respect to conversational turn.

Conversational exchanges are also characterized by the use of multiple modes (such as speech, gaze, gestures of the head and hands, and facial expression). Many interactive systems afford their users the opportunity to use these modes as well. A special class of interactive systems, embodied communicative agents or ECAs, make use of lifesize humanoid animated agents which are also capable of making use of these modes in order to communicate with their human users. This course introduces the main formal frameworks for distinguishing among modes of communication and examines the computational techniques for the automatic interpretation of multimodal user actions and the automatic generation of multimodal system actions.

Systems that have been designed to afford interactions that are conversational in nature are often touted as more natural, use-friendly, effecient, effective, and intuitive. This course examines the primary methods of evaluation that have been applied in the research community.

The primary mode of inquiry for this course will be the examination of exemplar interactive systems. The accomplishments and limitations of the existing models and techniques will be presented and open research problems will be discussed.