9th International Workshop On Spoken Dialogue System Technology

This book presents the outcomes of the 9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems (IWSDS), “Towards creating more human-like conversational agent technologies”. It compiles and provides a synopsis of current global research to push forward the state of the art in dialogue technologies, including advances in the context of the classical problems of language understanding, dialogue management and language generation, as well as cognitive topics related to the human nature of conversational phenomena, such as humor, empathy and social context understanding and awareness.

This book presents the outcomes of the 9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems (IWSDS), "Towards creating more human-like conversational agent technologies". It compiles and provides a synopsis of current global research to push forward the state of the art in dialogue technologies, including advances in the context of the classical problems of language understanding, dialogue management and language generation, as well as cognitive topics related to the human nature of conversational phenomena, such as humor, empathy and social context understanding and awareness.

Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology and Design covers key topics in the field of spoken language dialogue interaction from a variety of leading researchers. It brings together several perspectives in the areas of corpus annotation and analysis, dialogue system construction, as well as theoretical perspectives on communicative intention, context-based generation, and modelling of discourse structure. These topics are all part of the general research and development within the area of discourse and dialogue with an emphasis on dialogue systems; corpora and corpus tools and semantic and pragmatic modelling of discourse and dialogue.

This book includes peer-reviewed articles from the 12th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology, IWSDS 2021, Singapore. Nowadays, dialogue systems or conversational agents have become one of the most important mechanisms for human-computer or human-robot interaction that has been widely adopted as new paradigm for many applications, companies, and final users. On the other hand, recent advances in natural language processing, understanding and generation, as well as a continuous increasing computational power and large number of resources and data, have brought important and consistent improvements to the capabilities of dialogue systems enabling users to have more productive and enjoyable interactions. However, on the threshold of a new decade, the current state of the art shows important areas where improvements are needed such as incorporation of ground-based knowledge, personality, emotions, and adaptability, as well as automatic mechanisms for objective, robust and fast evaluations, especially in the context of developing social and e-health applications. In this 12th edition of the International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems (IWSDS), “Conversational AI for natural human-centric interaction“ compiles and presents a synopsis on current global research efforts to push forward the state of the art in dialogue technologies, including advances to the classical problems of dialogue management, language generation and understanding, personalisation and generation, spokena and multimodal interaction, dialogue evaluation, dialogue modelling and applications, as well as topics related to chatbots and conversational agent technologies.

This book compiles and presents a synopsis on current global research efforts to push forward the state of the art in dialogue technologies, including advances to language and context understanding, and dialogue management, as well as human–robot interaction, conversational agents, question answering and lifelong learning for dialogue systems.

Volume LNCS 13519 is part of the refereed proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2022, which was held virtually during June 26 to July 1, 2022. A total of 5583 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry, and governmental agencies from 88 countries submitted contributions, and 1276 papers and 275 posters were included in the proceedings that were published just before the start of the conference. Additionally, 296 papers and 181 posters are included in the volumes of the proceedings published after the conference, as “Late Breaking Work” (papers and posters). The contributions thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2019, held in Madrid, Spain, in November 2019.The 69 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 92 submissions. The theme of the 2018 conference is: Friendly Robotics.The papers focus on the following topics: perceptions and expectations of social robots; cognition and social values for social robots; verbal interaction with social robots; social cues and design of social robots; emotional and expressive interaction with social robots; collaborative SR and SR at the workplace; game approaches and applications to HRI; applications in health domain; robots at home and at public spaces; robots in education; technical innovations in social robotics; and privacy and safety of the social robots.

Considerable progress has been made in recent years in the development of dialogue systems that support robust and efficient human-machine interaction using spoken language. Spoken dialogue technology allows various interactive applications to be built and used for practical purposes, and research focuses on issues that aim to increase the system's communicative competence by including aspects of error correction, cooperation, multimodality, and adaptation in context. This book gives a comprehensive view of state-of-the-art techniques that are used to build spoken dialogue systems. It provides an overview of the basic issues such as system architectures, various dialogue management methods, system evaluation, and also surveys advanced topics concerning extensions of the basic model to more conversational setups. The goal of the book is to provide an introduction to the methods, problems, and solutions that are used in dialogue system development and evaluation. It presents dialogue modelling and system development issues relevant in both academic and industrial environments and also discusses requirements and challenges for advanced interaction management and future research. Table of Contents: Preface / Introduction to Spoken Dialogue Systems / Dialogue Management / Error Handling / Case Studies: Advanced Approaches to Dialogue Management / Advanced Issues / Methodologies and Practices of Evaluation / Future Directions / References / Author Biographies