Personal assistants need to allow the user to interact with the system in a flexible and adaptive way such as through spoken language dialogue. This research is aimed at achieving robust and effective dialogue management in such applications. We focus on an application, the Smart Personal Assistant (SPA), in which the user can use a variety of devices to interact with a collection of personal assistants, each specializing in a task domain. The current implementation of the SPA contains an e-mail management agent and a calendar agent that the user can interact with through a spoken dialogue and a graphical interface on PDAs. The user-system interaction is handled by a Dialogue Manager agent. We propose an agent-based approach that makes use of a BDI agent architecture for dialogue modelling and control. The Dialogue Manager agent of the SPA acts as the central point for maintaining coherent user-system interaction and coordinating the activities of the assistants. The dialogue model consists of a set of complex but modular plans for handling communicative goals. The dialogue control flow emerges automatically as the result of the agent???s plan selection by the BDI interpreter. In addition the Dialogue Manager maintains the conversational context, the domainspecific knowledge and the user model in its internal beliefs. We also consider the problem of dialogue adaptation in such agent-based dialogue systems. We present a novel way of integrating learning into a BDI architecture so that the agent can learn to select the most suitable plan among those applicable in the current context. This enables the Dialogue Manager agent to tailor its responses according to the conversational context and the user???s physical context, devices and preferences. Finally, we report the evaluation results, which indicate the robustness and effectiveness of the dialogue model in handling a range of users.

Personal assistants need to allow the user to interact with the system in a flexible and adaptive way such as through spoken language dialogue. This research is aimed at achieving robust and effective dialogue management in such applications. We focus on an application, the Smart Personal Assistant (SPA), in which the user can use a variety of devices to interact with a collection of personal assistants, each specializing in a task domain. The current implementation of the SPA contains an e-mail management agent and a calendar agent that the user can interact with through a spoken dialogue and a graphical interface on PDAs. The user-system interaction is handled by a Dialogue Manager agent. We propose an agent-based approach that makes use of a BDI agent architecture for dialogue modelling and control. The Dialogue Manager agent of the SPA acts as the central point for maintaining coherent user-system interaction and coordinating the activities of the assistants. The dialogue model consists of a set of complex but modular plans for handling communicative goals. The dialogue control flow emerges automatically as the result of the agent???s plan selection by the BDI interpreter. In addition the Dialogue Manager maintains the conversational context, the domainspecific knowledge and the user model in its internal beliefs. We also consider the problem of dialogue adaptation in such agent-based dialogue systems. We present a novel way of integrating learning into a BDI architecture so that the agent can learn to select the most suitable plan among those applicable in the current context. This enables the Dialogue Manager agent to tailor its responses according to the conversational context and the user???s physical context, devices and preferences. Finally, we report the evaluation results, which indicate the robustness and effectiveness of the dialogue model in handling a range of users.

Skyline has been proposed as an important operator for many applications, such as multi-criteria decision making, data mining and visualization, and user-preference queries. Due to its importance, skyline and its computation have received considerable attention from database research community recently. All the existing techniques, however, focus on the conventional databases. They are not applicable to online computation environment, such as data stream. In addition, the existing studies consider efficiency of skyline computation only, while the fundamental problem on the semantics of skylines still remains open. In this thesis, we study three problems of skyline computation: (1) online computing skyline over data stream; (2) skyline cube computation and its analysis; and (3) top-k most representative skyline. To tackle the problem of online skyline computation, we develop a novel framework which converts more expensive multiple dimensional skyline computation to stabbing queries in 1-dimensional space. Based on this framework, a rigorous theoretical analysis of the time complexity of online skyline computation is provided. Then, efficient algorithms are proposed to support ad hoc and continuous skyline queries over data stream. Inspired by the idea of data cube, we propose a novel concept of skyline cube which consists of skylines of all possible non-empty subsets of a given full space. We identify the unique sharing strategies for skyline cube computation and develop two efficient algorithms which compute skyline cube in a bottom-up and top-down manner, respectively. Finally, a theoretical framework to answer the question about semantics of skyline and analysis of multidimensional subspace skyline are presented. Motived by the fact that the full skyline may be less informative because it generally consists of a large number of skyline points, we proposed a novel skyline operator -- top-k most representative skyline. The top-k most representative skyline operator selects the k skyline points so that the number of data points, which are dominated by at least one of these k skyline points, is maximized. To compute top-k most representative skyline, two efficient algorithms and their theoretical analysis are presented.

Thesis (M.S.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Computer Science, Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 51-53).

Univ. Fridericiana, Fak. für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Diss.--Karlsruhe, 2006.

Thesis (M. Eng. (Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-112).

Thesis (M.A.)--Northern Kentucky University, 2007. / Made available through ProQuest. Publication number: AAT 1447118. ProQuest document ID: 1414135101. Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-90)

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Computer Science, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 169-179).