DIA

Current work in DIA focuses on the following areas:

Incremental Semantic Composition for laughter, smiling, and frowning

Work in the project DUEL (http://www.dsg-bielefeld.de/DUEL) project showed that laughter has stand alone propositional content, can affect truth conditions, and triggers implicatures. This work offered the first formal semantic account integrating laughter and dialogue processing, showing how this can be integrated into the KoS framework. An important prerequisite for developing a detailed account for this, as well as for processing disfluencies and exclamations, is a semantic framework that can handle incremental semantic and pragmatic processing multimodally and with rich semantic content, including quantification. The approach we are developing focuses on integrating content from non-verbal social signals such as laughter, smiling, and frowning with content emanating from speech.

Facial displays and their dialogical meanings: ESSLLI 2018 course

Jonathan Ginzburg, Julian Hough, Robin Cooper, and David Schlangen. Incrementality and Clarification / Sluicing Potential. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21, 2017

Interactive Gestures

Various gestures are used in dialogue to effect such actions as turn taking, quotation, and marking material as presuppositional. Although there has been much experimental work on this, a formal account is still missing and this is what we hope to develop in this sub-project.

Classification of Responses to Questions in Dialogue

The problem of classifying responses and then deciding how to react to them is one of the most fundamental tasks in Dialogue—it is closely related to the Turing Test. In earlier work Łupkowski and Ginzburg (2017) developed a wide coverage classification of query responses (responses to queries that are themselves queries) and also proposed a formal analysis of each class. We are currently working on scaling up this approach to cover the entire class of responses, developing a taxonomy, machine learning—based classification, and formal modelling as a basis for implementation in a dialogue system.

Łupkowski, P. & Ginzburg, J. 2017. Query responses. Journal of Language Modelling, 4(2), 245–292.