Interactive Multi Modal Question Answering

This book is the result of a group of researchers from different disciplines asking themselves one question: what does it take to develop a computer interface that listens, talks, and can answer questions in a domain? First, obviously, it takes specialized modules for speech recognition and synthesis, human interaction management (dialogue, input fusion, and multimodal output fusion), basic question understanding, and answer finding. While all modules are researched as independent subfields, this book describes the development of state-of-the-art modules and their integration into a single, working application capable of answering medical (encyclopedic) questions such as "How long is a person with measles contagious?" or "How can I prevent RSI?". The contributions in this book, which grew out of the IMIX project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, document the development of this system, but also address more general issues in natural language processing, such as the development of multidimensional dialogue systems, the acquisition of taxonomic knowledge from text, answer fusion, sequence processing for domain-specific entity recognition, and syntactic parsing for question answering. Together, they offer an overview of the most important findings and lessons learned in the scope of the IMIX project, making the book of interest to both academic and commercial developers of human-machine interaction systems in Dutch or any other language. Highlights include: integrating multi-modal input fusion in dialogue management (Van Schooten and Op den Akker), state-of-the-art approaches to the extraction of term variants (Van der Plas, Tiedemann, and Fahmi; Tjong Kim Sang, Hofmann, and De Rijke), and multi-modal answer fusion (two chapters by Van Hooijdonk, Bosma, Krahmer, Maes, Theune, and Marsi). Watch the IMIX movie at www.nwo.nl/imix-film. Like IBM's Watson, the IMIX system described in the book gives naturally phrased responses to naturally posed questions. Where Watson can only generate synthetic speech, the IMIX system also recognizes speech. On the other hand, Watson is able to win a television quiz, while the IMIX system is domain-specific, answering only to medical questions. "The Netherlands has always been one of the leaders in the general field of Human Language Technology, and IMIX is no exception. It was a very ambitious program, with a remarkably successful performance leading to interesting results. The teams covered a remarkable amount of territory in the general sphere of multimodal question answering and information delivery, question answering, information extraction and component technologies." Eduard Hovy, USC, USA, Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Norbert Reithinger, DFKI, Germany

This book is the result of a group of researchers from different disciplines asking themselves one question: what does it take to develop a computer interface that listens, talks, and can answer questions in a domain? First, obviously, it takes specialized modules for speech recognition and synthesis, human interaction management (dialogue, input fusion, and multimodal output fusion), basic question understanding, and answer finding. While all modules are researched as independent subfields, this book describes the development of state-of-the-art modules and their integration into a single, working application capable of answering medical (encyclopedic) questions such as "How long is a person with measles contagious?" or "How can I prevent RSI?". The contributions in this book, which grew out of the IMIX project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, document the development of this system, but also address more general issues in natural language processing, such as the development of multidimensional dialogue systems, the acquisition of taxonomic knowledge from text, answer fusion, sequence processing for domain-specific entity recognition, and syntactic parsing for question answering. Together, they offer an overview of the most important findings and lessons learned in the scope of the IMIX project, making the book of interest to both academic and commercial developers of human-machine interaction systems in Dutch or any other language. Highlights include: integrating multi-modal input fusion in dialogue management (Van Schooten and Op den Akker), state-of-the-art approaches to the extraction of term variants (Van der Plas, Tiedemann, and Fahmi; Tjong Kim Sang, Hofmann, and De Rijke), and multi-modal answer fusion (two chapters by Van Hooijdonk, Bosma, Krahmer, Maes, Theune, and Marsi). Watch the IMIX movie at www.nwo.nl/imix-film. Like IBM's Watson, the IMIX system described in the book gives naturally phrased responses to naturally posed questions. Where Watson can only generate synthetic speech, the IMIX system also recognizes speech. On the other hand, Watson is able to win a television quiz, while the IMIX system is domain-specific, answering only to medical questions. "The Netherlands has always been one of the leaders in the general field of Human Language Technology, and IMIX is no exception. It was a very ambitious program, with a remarkably successful performance leading to interesting results. The teams covered a remarkable amount of territory in the general sphere of multimodal question answering and information delivery, question answering, information extraction and component technologies." Eduard Hovy, USC, USA, Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Norbert Reithinger, DFKI, Germany

In the past twenty years, computers and networks have gained a prominent role in supporting human communications. This book presents recent research in multimodal information processing, which demonstrates that computers can achieve more than what telephone calls or videoconferencing can do. The book offers a snapshot of current capabilities for the analysis of human communications in several modalities – audio, speech, language, images, video, and documents – and for accessing this information interactively. The book has a clear application goal, which is the capture, automatic analysis, storage, and retrieval of multimodal signals from human interaction in meetings. This goal provides a controlled experimental framework and helps generating shared data, which is required for methods based on machine learning. This goal has shaped the vision of the contributors to the book and of many other researchers cited in it. It has also received significant long-term support through a series of projects, including the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) in Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2), to which the contributors to the book have been connected.

This book provides a synthesis of the multifaceted field of interactive multimodal information management. The subjects treated include spoken language processing, image and video processing, document and handwriting analysis, identity information and interfaces. The book concludes with an overview of the highlights of the progress of the field during the past ten years, as well as the problems that are now under investigation and that offer the most promising results for the future. The book is addressed to the graduate student/postdoc level, but much of the book will be accessible to all those with a general background in information processing.

Here is the third of a four-volume set that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2007, held in Beijing, China, in July 2007, jointly with eight other thematically similar conferences. It covers multimodality and conversational dialogue; adaptive, intelligent and emotional user interfaces; gesture and eye gaze recognition; and interactive TV and media.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the Fourth IAPR TC9 Workshop on Pattern Recognition of Social Signals in Human-Computer-Interaction, MPRSS 2016, held in Cancun, Mexico, in December 2016. The 13 revised papers presented focus on pattern recognition, machine learning and information fusion methods with applications in social signal processing, including multimodal emotion recognition, user identification, and recognition of human activities.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction held in July 2005. The 38 revised full papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on multimodal processing, HCI and applications, discourse and dialogue, emotion, visual processing, speech and audio processing, and NIST meeting recognition evaluation.