[Ltg] HAIL Seminar *Reminder* (28th March): Anh Nguyen, UNSW

[Andrew Lampert]

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


Title:          An Agent-Based Approach to Dialogue Management for
                    Smart Personal Assistants

Speaker:        Anh Nguyen
                (Joint work with Associate Professor Wayne Wobcke,
                  Alfred Kryzwicki and Van Ho)
                School of Computer Science and Engineering
                University of New South Wales

Date:           Tuesday 28th March 2006 at 11am

Location:       CSIRO ICT Centre,
                Building E6B, Macquarie University.

                See <http://www.ict.csiro.au/HAIL/location.htm> for details.


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                At the nominated time above, point your browser at:
                <http://webcast.nsw.csiro.au/httpfs/ICT/HailSeminar/live.asx>


Abstract

We discuss an agent-based approach to dialogue management for a Smart Personal Assistant (SPA) system that enables users to access a range of applications from a range of devices using multi-modal natural language dialogue. Each back-end application is a personal assistant specializing in one specific task such as e-mail or calendar management, and typically each has its own user model, enabling it to adapt to the user's changing preferences. The interface to the SPA must present the system as a single unified set of applications, and enable the user to conduct a dialogue in which it is easy to switch between these applications.

The SPA is implemented using a BDI agent platform (JACK Intelligent Agents) with PDA and Desktop interfaces, and includes a special Dialogue Manager agent that uses plans both for encoding the system's dialogue model and for coordinating the actions of the individual assistants so as to satisfy the user's requests. This plan-based dialogue model enables information from the back-end to be used in interpreting user utterances, and is also at a high level of abstraction, enabling the domain-independent plans in the dialogue model to be reused in different SPA systems. We also discuss the problem of dialogue adaptation in the SPA system, which is reduced to the problem of learning the appropriate dialogue plan to select in a given context. This adaptation enables the system to tailor its responses to the conversational context, the user's physical context and the user's devices and preferences. The PDA version of the SPA will be demonstrated.


Short resume

Anh Nguyen is a research student in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales. Currently, she is in the final year of her PhD. Her research interests focus on natural language processing, particularly dialogue management in spoken natural language systems. She is currently parcitipating in the Smart Personal Assistants Programme of the Smart Internet Technology CRC, in which she develops the dialogue manager for a Smart Personal Assistant that allows users to access a range of applications from a variety of devices using multi-modal natural language dialogue.


----------------------------------------
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http://www.ict.csiro.au/HAIL/

Contacts:       Andrew Lampert
Address:        CSIRO HAIL Seminars,
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Phone:  (02) 9325 3100
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