[Ltg] HAIL Seminar *Reminder* (13th April): Dr Dominique Estival, DSTO

[Andrew Lampert]

                      H.A.I.L. Seminar series
                          CSIRO ICT Centre
                   http://www.ict.csiro.au/HAIL/


Title:          Conversations with Virtual Advisers

Speaker:        Dr Dominique Estival
                Human Systems Integration Group
                Defence Science and Technology Organisation
                Edinburgh, South Australia

Date:           Tuesday 13th April 2004 at 11am

Location:       CSIRO Conference Room,
                Building E6B, Macquarie University.


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                to have it video-recorded (if the speaker agrees).
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Abstract

In this talk, I will present the spoken dialogue system designed and implemented for Virtual Advisers in the FOCAL (Future Operations Centre Analysis Laboratory) environment.

The architecture of the system is based on Dialogue Agents using propositional attitudes. The Natural Language Understanding component using typed unification grammar (Regulus) is linked to a commercial speaker-independent speech recognition system (Nuance). The current application aims to facilitate the multi-media presentation of military planning information in a semi-immersive environment.

I will discuss some of the technical aspects of FOCAL which are relevant to the dialogue application and show how a fragment of the scenario has been implemented. I will also describe the improvements and additions which have been made to the system in the past year and sketch our next research directions.


Short resume

Dominique Estival has been a Senior Research Scientist at DSTO since early 2002. After receiving her PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986, she started working as a computational linguist in industry: first in a machine translation company (Weidner, Chicago, USA; 1986-88) and then at Wang Laboratories (Boston, USA; 1988-89). She was a researcher at ISSCO (Geneva, Switzerland, 1989-1995) before coming to Australia to take up the position of lecturer in Computational Linguistics at the University of Melbourne (1995-1998). She then joined Syrinx Speech Systems in 1999 to head the Natural Language Processing group and lead the NLP R&D project to develop a natural language telephone dialogue system.

Her research interests have included the investigation of the computational modelling of language change, machine translation, grammar formalisms, grammar development and linguistic engineering, and spoken dialogue systems. At DSTO, she continues to work on spoken dialogue systems and machine translation tools, and also on other applications such as document classification and multi-media interaction.


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Contacts:       Andrew Lampert
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