We have a recently accepted paper to the upcoming NAACL 2015 conference which will be held in Denver, CO, U.S.A.

Title:  Incrementally Tracking Reference in Human/Human Dialogue Using Linguistic and Extra-Linguistic Information

Authors: Casey Kennington, Ryu Iida, Takenobu Tokunaga, David Schlangen

Abstract:
A large part of human communication involves referring to entities in the world, and often these entities are objects that are visually present for the interlocutors. A system that aims to resolve such references needs to tackle a complex task: objects and their visual features need to be determined, the referring expressions must be recognised, and extra-linguistic information such as eye gaze or pointing gestures need to be incorporated. Systems that can make use of such information sources exist, but have so far only been tested under very constrained settings, such as WOz interactions. In this paper, we apply to a more complex domain a reference resolution model that works incrementally (i.e., word for word), grounds words with visually present properties of objects (such as shape and size), and can incorporate extra-linguistic information. We find that the model works well compared to previous work on the same data, despite using fewer features. We conclude that the model shows potential for use in a real-time interactive dialogue system.

We have 2 recently accepted papers to the IWCS conference which will take place in London, UK.

Title: Incremental Semantics for Dialogue Processing: Requirements, and a Comparison of Two Approaches
Authors: Julian Hough, Casey Kennington, David Schlangen and Jonathan Ginzburg
Abstract:
Truly interactive dialogue systems need to construct meaning on at least a word-by-word basis. We propose desiderata for incremental semantics for dialogue models and systems, a task not heretofore attempted thoroughly. After laying out the desirable properties we illustrate how they are met by current approaches, comparing two incremental semantic processing frameworks: Dynamic Syntax enriched with Type Theory with Records (DS-TTR) and Robust Minimal Recursion Semantics with incremental processing (RMRS-IP). We conclude these approaches are not significantly different with regards to their semantic representation construction, however their purported role within semantic models and dialogue models is where they diverge.

Title: A Discriminative Model for Perceptually-Grounded Incremental Reference Resolution
Authors: Casey Kennington, Livia Dia, David Schlangen
Abstract:
A large part of human communication involves referring to entities in the world, and often these entities are objects that are visually present for the interlocutors. A computer system that aims to resolve such references needs to tackle a complex task: objects and their visual features need to be determined, the referring expressions must be recognised, extra-linguistic information such as eye gaze or pointing gestures need to be incorporated — and the intended connection between words and world must be reconstructed. In this paper, we introduce a discriminative model of reference resolution that processes incrementally (i.e., word for word), is perceptually-grounded in the world, and improves when interpolated with information from gaze and pointing gestures. We evaluated our model and found that it performed robustly in a realistic reference resolution task, when compared to a generative model.