After almost 10 years, my time at Bielefeld University has come to an end. Which makes this domain name obsolete. Information about my research group can now be found at the CoLab Potsdam Site. I will keep this webpage here up and running for a while, but all new information will only be posted at the Potsdam site.

Welcome. This is the homepage of The Dialogue Systems Group at Bielefeld University, located at the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies and the “Cluster of Excellence ‘Cognitive Interaction Technology’” (CITEC). Here you’ll find our latest news, publications from our group, software that we have released, and other information.

Research Interests

We are interested both in natural and in artificial systems that can engage in (mostly) verbal interaction. In our empirical work, we look at human–human interactions, both task-oriented as well as more conversational. We sometimes make use of existing corpora, but also record such interactions in our new dialogue lab, where we have facilities for making high-quality audio and video recordings, as well as capturing body motion and tracking facial parameters including eye gaze. The empirical work motivates our modeling efforts, where again we’re interested in two — ideally complementary — things: a) purely explanatory models, which may be implemented in simulations or functional system in `toy domains’, or may exist just “on paper”, and b) practical systems, where the focus is more on building a useful computer interface than on staying true to the original, i.e. the human.

One aspect of verbal interaction we’re particularly interested in is the interplay between the needs to manage the interaction itself and to drive the dialogue forwards by `adding content’.

Some keywords describing our interests are: turn-taking; grounding: monitoring, self-correction, giving feedback, expansion of ongoing utterances, asking for clarification, correction of misunderstanding; coherence in interpretation; prediction; engagement.