ColloquiaTTI Talk by Matthew Stone on 11/20/02

[Margery Ishmael]

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TOYOTA TECHNICAL INSTITUTE - TALK
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Date: Wednesday, November 20th, 2002

Time: 2:30 p.m.

Place: Ryerson Hall 251

Speaker: Matthew Stone, Rutgers University

Title: Meaning and Collaboration in Conversational Agents

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Abstract:
Users expect spoken language interfaces to recognize their words and
respond intelligently to their needs. It has proved surprisingly
difficult to meet these expectations in a general way, because what we
say and do in conversation so intimately reflects our information, our
intentions, and our engagement with one another. Nevertheless,
computer systems can increasingly hold up their end of a conversation.
In this talk, I will use implemented prototypes (my own and others) to
describe some of the characteristic features of conversational
language use for which there has been significant recent progress,
including:
- the signals and feedback that keep conversations going;
- the collaborative context that informs language understanding and
generation;
- the coordination that allows one interlocutor to signal her
expectations for the conversation, and another interlocutor to meet
them.

An important common theme in these developments is a collaborative
view of meaning that is increasingly widespread in the science of
language: As language users, we construct the meanings of our
utterances, through the collaborative decisions we take as we draw on
the rules of language to make ourselves understood.

As we improve not only the conversational competence of these systems,
but our ability to prototype such systems quickly, scale them up
tractably, and optimize them empirically, we can expect to see an
increasing variety of spoken language interfaces in our everyday
lives.

Bio: Matthew Stone is Assistant Professor at the Department of
Computer Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
He completed his PhD in Computer and Information Science at
University of Pennsylvania in 1998.  http://athos.rutgers.edu/~mdstone/

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HOST: David McAllester and TTI

*The talk will be followed by refreshments in Ryerson 255*

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please send e-mail to Meridel 
Trimble
mtrimble at tti-c.org