I Can Parse You: Grammars for Dialogs

Authors Martin Hirzel, Louis Mandel, Avraham Shinnar, Jerome Simeon, Mandana Vaziri



PDF
Thumbnail PDF

File

LIPIcs.SNAPL.2017.6.pdf
  • Filesize: 0.5 MB
  • 15 pages

Document Identifiers

Author Details

Martin Hirzel
Louis Mandel
Avraham Shinnar
Jerome Simeon
Mandana Vaziri

Cite AsGet BibTex

Martin Hirzel, Louis Mandel, Avraham Shinnar, Jerome Simeon, and Mandana Vaziri. I Can Parse You: Grammars for Dialogs. In 2nd Summit on Advances in Programming Languages (SNAPL 2017). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 71, pp. 6:1-6:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2017)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SNAPL.2017.6

Abstract

Humans and computers increasingly converse via natural language. Those conversations are moving from today's simple question answering and command-and-control to more complex dialogs. Developers must specify those dialogs. This paper explores how to assist developers in this specification. We map out the staggering variety of applications for human-computer dialogs and distill it into a catalog of flow patterns. Based on that, we articulate the requirements for dialog programming models and offer our vision for satisfying these requirements using grammars. If our approach catches on, computers will soon parse you to better assist you in your daily life.
Keywords
  • Bots
  • virtual agents
  • dialog managers
  • domain-specific languages

Metrics

  • Access Statistics
  • Total Accesses (updated on a weekly basis)
    0
    PDF Downloads

References

  1. Ion Androutsopoulos, Graeme D. Ritchie, and Peter Thanisch. Natural language interfaces to databases - an introduction. Natural Language Engineering, 1(1):29-81, 1995. Google Scholar
  2. Matthew Arnold, David Grove, Benjamin Herta, Michael Hind, Martin Hirzel, Arun Iyengar, Louis Mandel, V.A. Saraswat, Avraham Shinnar, Jérôme Siméon, Mikio Takeuchi, Olivier Tardieu, and Wei Zhang. META: Middleware for events, transactions, and analytics. IBM R&D, 60(2-3):15:1-15:10, 2016. Google Scholar
  3. Daniel G. Bobrow, Ronald M. Kaplan, Martin Kay, Donald A. Norman, Henry Thompson, and Terry Winograd. GUS, a frame-driven dialog system. Artificial Intelligence, 8(2):155-173, 1977. Google Scholar
  4. Derek Bridge. Towards conversational recommender systems: A dialogue grammar approach. In European Conference on Case Based Reasoning (ECCBR) Workshops, pages 9-22, 2002. Google Scholar
  5. Björn Bringert. Rapid development of dialogue systems by grammar compilation. In Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial), pages 223-226, 2007. Google Scholar
  6. Herbert H. Clark and Susan E. Brennan. Grounding in communication. Perspectives on socially shared cognition, 13:127-149, 1991. Google Scholar
  7. Herbert H. Clark and Edward F. Schaefer. Contributing to discourse. Cognitive Science, 13(2):259-294, 1989. Google Scholar
  8. Matthias Denecke and Alex Waibel. Dialogue strategies guiding users to their communicative goals. In European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (EuroSpeech), pages 1339-1342, 1997. Google Scholar
  9. Norbert E. Fuchs, Kaarel Kaljurand, and Tobias Kuhn. Attempto Controlled English for knowledge representation. Reasoning Web, pages 104-124, 2008. Google Scholar
  10. Sumit Gulwani and Mark Marron. NLyze: Interactive programming by natural language for spreadsheet data analysis and manipulation. In International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), pages 803-814, 2014. Google Scholar
  11. Stephen Holland. Talents in the left brain, 2001. Retrieved Jan., 2017. URL: http://hiddentalents.org/brain/113-left.html.
  12. IBM. Watson Conversation service. Retrieved Jan., 2017. URL: https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/conversation.html.
  13. Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin. Speech and Language Processing. Prentice Hall, second edition, 2009. Google Scholar
  14. Ron Kaplan. Beyond the GUI: It’s time for a conversational user interface. Wired, 2013. URL: https://www.wired.com/2013/03/conversational-user-interface/.
  15. Rohit J. Kate, Yuk Wah Wong, and Raymond J. Mooney. Learning to transform natural to formal languages. In Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pages 1062-1068, 2005. Google Scholar
  16. Tobias Kuhn. A survey and classification of controlled natural languages. Computational Linguistics, 40(1):121-170, 2014. Google Scholar
  17. Chia-Wei Liu, Ryan Lowe, Iulian V. Serban, Michael Noseworthy, Laurent Charlin, and Joelle Pineau. How NOT to evaluate your dialogue system: An empirical study of unsupervised evaluation metrics for dialogue response generation, 2016. URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08023v1.
  18. Bruce Lucas. VoiceXML for web-based distributed conversational applications. Communications of the ACM (CACM), 43(9):53-57, 2000. Google Scholar
  19. Michael F. McTear. Spoken dialogue technology: Enabling the conversational interface. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 34(1):90-169, 2002. Google Scholar
  20. Aarne Ranta. Grammatical Framework: A type-theoretical grammar formalism. Journal of Functional Programming (JFP), 14(2):145-189, 2004. Google Scholar
  21. Mandana Vaziri, Olivier Tardieu, Rodric Rabbah, Philippe Suter, and Martin Hirzel. Stream processing with a spreadsheet. In European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP), pages 360-384, 2014. Google Scholar
  22. Marilyn A. Walker, Diane J. Litman, Candace A. Kamm, and Alicia Abella. PARADISE: A framework for evaluating spoken dialogue agents. In Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pages 271-280, 1997. Google Scholar
  23. Jason D. Williams, Nobal B. Niraula, Pradeep Dasigi, Aparna Lakshmiratan, Carlos Garcia Jurado Suarez, Mouni Reddy, and Geoff Zweig. Rapidly scaling dialog systems with interactive learning. In International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems (IWSDS), pages 1-13, 2015. Google Scholar
Questions / Remarks / Feedback
X

Feedback for Dagstuhl Publishing


Thanks for your feedback!

Feedback submitted

Could not send message

Please try again later or send an E-mail