Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1996. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [178]-186).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Jena. / Includes bibliographical references.

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Les développements issus de la recherche en gestion du dialogue homme-machine portent essentiellement sur le dialogue utilitaire et délaissent le dialogue à caractère ludique ou récréatif. Une description détaillée du contexte et la reconnaissance des buts ne suffisent pas à appréhender les enjeux de ce type de dialogue. La thèse vise à démontrer qu'un système s'appuyant sur une reconnaissance robuste et fine des actes de dialogue et des intentions associée à une prise en compte de l'altérité, de l'éthique et des émotions peut faire émerger une personnalité dialogique à même d'interagir de façon crédible avec un humain et de reproduire certaines performances dans le contexte d'un dialogue de séduction. L'objectif ne consiste pas à faire en sorte que le système puisse être confondu avec un humain comme cela est le cas dans les tests d'intelligence mais plutôt faire en sorte que le système puisse être dirigé par l'intérêt de la conversation. A cette fin, les recherches portent sur la définition de la relation d'altérité JE-TU appliquée au dialogue par l'intermédiaire de la théorie des jeux notamment à travers les concepts de définition de soi, d'éthique de la discussion et de modèles d'émotions. Plusieurs pistes sont explorées dans le but de réunir un corpus d'étude, notamment des prototypes de jeux collaboratifs. Au final, le modèle de personnage est développé sur la base d'un corpus de scripts de cinéma. Ce modèle repose sur une nouvelle taxonomie de phénomènes de dialogue incluant des actes perlocutoires et une approche différente de la connaissance permettant d'inclure l'éthique et le lien d'altérité en son sein. Les stratégies qui régissent le dialogue sont alors décrites de manière beaucoup plus précise. Une scène extraite d'un film servant de cadre applicatif aux expérimentations permet de valider l'architecture du système de dialogue. / Most of the developments issued from the research in man computer dialogue management are mainly focused on functional dialogue and put aside entertainment dialogue. A sharper context description and goals recognition remains quite limited to fully grasp the stakes of type of dialogue. The thesis aims to demonstrate that a system based on a thin and robust recognition of dialogue acts and intentions linked to a consideration for the concept of relation of otherness, ethics and emotions could leads to the emergence of a dialogic personality. Such a system would be able to interact with a human being in a credible way and reproduce some of its achievements in the context of a seduction dialogue. Unlike the common approach developed for intelligence tests, the purpose is not to mimic a human, but to manage the dialogue based on the notion of interest. To achieve this goal, researches deal with the relation of otherness applied to dialogue within game theory and especially through the concepts of Self-definition, Discourse Ethics and Emotions Modeling. The corpora collection process follows many ways including collaborative games. At the end, the character model is developed using a movie script corpora on the basis of a new dialogue phenomena taxonomy including perlocutionary acts and a new approach of knowledge that incorporate ethics and the relation of otherness. It leads to a thinner description of dialogue strategies. A scene extracted from a movie aims to validate the final architecture as an experimental framework.

After the Second Vatican Council, which took place in 1962-1965, the Catholic Church reached out to both co-religionists and non-Christians. As the second largest religion in the world (after Christianity), the Muslim world began to react to this call for dialogue. Without a worldwide religious authority, Muslim scholars and communities have tried to understand and respond to this call for dialogue in their own way. Turkey, as one of the most influential and modern Muslim majority states, joined the discussion about interreligious dialogue, especially with Christians. Very diverse in culture, religion, and thought, Turkish scholars' discussions and critiques of the dialogue requested by the Christian world have clearly contributed to interreligious dialogue on a global scale in the last decades. This dissertation examines the development of interreligious dialogue in Turkey and the works of prominent and widely recognized Turkish theologians as a response to the Christian call for dialogue. It explores the problems, challenges, and future of the perception of interreligious dialogue in the Turkish context, in particular, the views of three influential Turkish scholars: Abdurrahman Küçük, Mahmut Aydin, and Davut Aydüz. The conclusion proposes the Turkish Model for interreligious dialogue. / Religion

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Le présent manuscrit présente de nouvelles techniques d'extraction des structures : du dialogue de groupe, d'une part; de textes argumentatifs, d'autre part. Déceler la structure de longs textes et de conversations est une étape cruciale afin de reconstruire leur signification sous-jacente. La difficulté de cette tâche est largement reconnue, sachant que le discours est une description de haut niveau du langage, et que le dialogue de groupe inclut de nombreux phénomènes linguistiques complexes. Historiquement, la représentation du discours a fortement évolué, partant de relations locales, formant des collections non-structurées, vers des arbres, puis des graphes contraints. Nos travaux utilisent ce dernier paradigme, via la Théorie de Représentation du Discours Segmenté. Notre recherche se base sur un corpus annoté de discussions en ligne en anglais, issues du jeu de société Les Colons de Catane. De par la nature stratégique des conversations, et la liberté que permet le format électronique des discussions, ces dialogues contiennent des Unités Discursives Complexes, des fils de discussion intriqués, parmi d'autres propriétés que la littérature actuelle sur l'analyse du discours ignore en général. Nous discutons de deux investigations liées à notre corpus. La première étend la définition de la contrainte de la frontière droite, une formalisation de certains principes de cohérence de la structure du discours, pour l'adapter au dialogue de groupe. La seconde fait la démonstration d'un processus d'extraction de données permettant à un joueur artificiel des Colons d'obtenir un avantage stratégique en déduisant les possessions de ses adversaires à partir de leurs négociations. Nous proposons de nouvelles méthodes d'analyse du dialogue, utilisant conjointement apprentissage automatisé, algorithmes de graphes et optimisation linéaire afin de produire des structures riches et expressives, avec une précision supérieure comparée aux efforts existants. Nous décrivons notre méthode d'analyse du discours par contraintes, d'abord sur des arbres en employant la construction d'un arbre couvrant maximal, puis sur des graphes orientés acycliques en utilisant la programmation linéaire par entiers avec une collection de contraintes originales. Nous appliquons enfin ces méthodes sur les structures de l'argumentation, avec un corpus de textes en anglais et en allemand, parallèlement annotés avec deux structures du discours et une argumentative. Nous comparons les trois couches d'annotation et expérimentons sur l'analyse de l'argumentation, obtenant de meilleurs résultats, relativement à des travaux similaires. / This work presents novel techniques for parsing the structures of multi-party dialogue and argumentative texts. Finding the structure of extended texts and conversations is a critical step towards the extraction of their underlying meaning. The task is notoriously hard, as discourse is a high-level description of language, and multi-party dialogue involves many complex linguistic phenomena. Historically, representation of discourse moved from local relationships, forming unstructured collections, towards trees, then constrained graphs. Our work uses the latter framework, through Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. We base our research on a annotated corpus of English chats from the board game The Settlers of Catan. Per the strategic nature of the conversation and the freedom of online chat, these dialogues exhibit complex discourse units, interwoven threads, among other features which are mostly overlooked by the current parsing literature. We discuss two corpus-related experiments. The first expands the definition of the Right Frontier Constraint, a formalization of discourse coherence principles, to adapt it to multi-party dialogue. The second demonstrates a data extraction process giving a strategic advantage to an artificial player of Settlers by inferring its opponents' assets from chat negotiations. We propose new methods to parse dialogue, using jointly machine learning, graph algorithms and linear optimization, to produce rich and expressive structures with greater accuracy than previous attempts. We describe our method of constrained discourse parsing, first on trees using the Maximum Spanning Tree algorithm, then on directed acyclic graphs using Integer Linear Programming with a number of original constraints. We finally apply these methods to argumentative structures, on a corpus of English and German texts, jointly annotated in two discourse representation frameworks and one argumentative. We compare the three annotation layers, and experiment on argumentative parsing, achieving better performance than similar works.

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) seek to provide a more natural means of interaction for a user through conversation. ECA build on the dialogue abilities of spoken dialogue systems with the provision of a physical or virtual avatar. The rationale for this Thesis is that an ECA should be able to support a form of conversation capable of understanding both the content and affect of the dialogue and providing a meaningful response. The aim is to examine the cognitive aspects of ECA attempting such conversational dialogue in order to augment the abilities of dialogue management. The focus is on the provision of cognitive functions, outside of dialogue control, for managing the relationship with the user including the user’s emotional state. This will include a definition of conversation and an examination of the cognitive mechanisms that underpin meaningful conversation. The scope of this Thesis considers the development of a Companion ECA, the ‘How Was Your Day’ (HWYD) Companion, which enters into an open conversation with the user about the events of their day at work. The HWYD Companion attempts to positively influence the user’s attitude to these events. The main focus of this Thesis is on the Affective Strategy Module (ASM) which will attend to the information covering these events and the user’s emotional state in order to generate a plan for a narrative response. Within this narrative response the ASM will embed a means of influence acting upon the user’s attitude to the events. The HYWD Companion has contributed to the work on ECA through the provision of a system engaging in conversational dialogue including the affective aspects of such dialogue. This supports open conversation with longer utterances than typical task-oriented dialogue systems and can handle user interruptions. The main work of this Thesis provides a major component of this overall contribution and, in addition, provides a specific contribution of its own with the provision of narrative persuasion.

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Understanding what is being communicated in a dialogue involves determining how it is coherent, that is, how the successive turns in the dialogue are related, what the speakers’ intentions, goals, beliefs, and expectations are and how they relate to each other’s responses. This thesis aims to address how turns in dialogue are related when one speaker indicates contrast with something in the preceding discourse signalled by “but”. Different relations cued by “but” will be distinguished and characterised when they relate material spanning speaker turns and an implementation in a working dialogue system is specified with the aim of enabling a better model of dialogue understanding and achieving more precise response generation. A large amount of research in discourse addresses coherence in monologue, and much of it focuses on cases in which the coherence relation is explicitly signalled via a cue-phrase or discourse marker (e.g., “on the other hand”, “but”, et cetera) which provides an explicit cue about the nature of the underlying relation linking the two clauses. However despite research on Speech Acts, planning research into speakers’ intentions, and semantic approaches to question-answering dialogues, very little work has focused on coherence relations across turns in dialogue even given the presence of a cue-phrase. This thesis will explore what sorts of relations the speaker of the “but” perceives between elements in the dialogue, and in particular, it will focus on “but”s communicating Denial of Expectation, Concession, and Correction by determining what underlying cross-turn expectations are denied in the former two, and what is being corrected in the latter case. We will extend work by Lagerwerf (1998) in monologue which presents a treatment for Denial of Expectation and Concession arguing that “but” implicates a defeasible expectation which is then denied (in Denial of Expectation) or argued against (in Concession). We also follow Knott’s approach (Knott, 1999a) of describing the semantics of a cue-phrase algorithmically from the agent’s mental model of the related utterances. Task-oriented and nontask-oriented spoken dialogues involving turn-initial “but” are examined, motivating a logical scheme whereby Denial of Expectation, Concession and Correction can be distinguished. These relations are then modelled in the PTT (Poesio and Traum, 1998) Information State (Matheson, Poesio and Traum, 2000) model of dialogue, enabling more relevant response generation in dialogue systems.