It is over two months late, but, what the hell, I do think it is still interesting and finally all of us got back from our summer vacations, Interspeech, etc, so here goes Pt 3 of the ESS07 Review: Student Presentations.
I regret not having done it before, as now some memories start to fade (and not having the presentation slides make it even harder to remember- Ian, help!?;)). If you are one of my colleagues and I fail to give due detail to your presentation, I assure you that this is not necessarily a reflex of a lack of interest or consideration of my part, but only the indication of a faulty memory. I invite you to add or expand the bit on your presentation. Also, please let me know if I misunderstood anything.
Most days we had the last section of our workday filled with student presentations. Each student had about 15 min to present, followed by 5 min of questions. Most of us were first-year PhD students, but we had also senior researchers such as Dietmar and Tanel.
David Del Vale Agudo presented on a multi-agent architecture for Dialogue Systems that used FIPA's ACL for communication.
Alvaro and Beatriz are the people who made the basis of the interface currently being used by Telefonica in the Companions Project. Small world, uh? Alvaro presented on biometry and voice recognition and Beatriz on the influence of ECAS upon the users perceptions. Or was it the other way around?(yes, they are a couple and always together, so I end up indexing all my tech discussions to the couple instead of its constituting individuals)
Trung presented on PODMP and so did Chandramohan. I found Trung’s work somewhat similar to Steve Young’s.
Pietra Maria presented on multi-party dialogue history.
Francesco Nesta (University of Trento/Italy) presented his work on the identification and separation of the user voice in a dialog system under usual ambient noise, such as television, radio,etc. To be more precise, a system in a smart home environment to identify the audio source of commands with all the background noise commonly found in a house. Even in the initial stages his results were impressive – I will definitely watch it out and try to bring some of it into both my thesis(after all games are noisy by nature – just consider the kids yelling!) and my work(a Companion should be with the user at all times and not get clueless if the user turns on the radio).
Timo Balman made a presentation on speech processing and prosody. He seemed to be heading towards an alternative but synthesizing approach to the field. Quite ambitious undertaking, but, alas, it is refreshing to see someone trying something bold now and then.
Weiwei presented not on his PhD research, but gave an introduction to the Companions project, which is part of his ongoing work.
I presented my preliminary results of the investigation of the intersection of dialogue systems and computer games. Basically in this first iteration I am trying to answer to what extend computer games constitute a particular domain, to discover the opportunities and challenges games present to the advancement of the research on dialogue systems, and what new features, game modes and benefits dialogue systems might bring to computer games. You can take a peek at the presentation and then check the articles on AI Wisdom 4 if you got excited about it!
The three Portuguese, Ana, Pedro and Filipe, jointly presented on a dialog system(L2F Butler?) that used Communicator and had a multi-agent realization.
Tanel presented on an Estonian dialogue system that was deployed at several contexts – I remember particularly the bits on ticket reservation. Particularly interesting bits were the techniques to deal with the challenges of the Estonian language itself(which seemed to me to have strong commonalities with Finish, Swedish and Russian).
Sheyla McCarthy presented on *Companions for the Elderly*. She did exactly he background and focus group studies that AFAIK no one has done in Companions yet- interviews with the elderly, design constraints based on their cognitive performance, social aspects to take into account in the dialogue system and, which I found most important from a pragmatic point of view, the acceptance of such a system by the elderly. She used a PDA-like device for the first test, and found out that most people found it difficult operate, though most were quite interested in the services her demonstrator provided. HCI and making it easy to use were pointed as major factors for the success of her research, which I fully agree. I guess she will receive an invite for a talk soon, from the Computer Science Department of the
Dietmar has shown his ongoing work on using the questions asked by students in an automatic dialogue system as a measure of the very student performance and understanding.
Daniel Schulman has shown research related to Companions too – how to make people feel that the dialogue system empathized with them, on a long term interaction.
Yun Jin(
Theodora Kolouri[1](aka Lela) has shown her preliminary investigation on dialogue by/with robots. I found it interesting that her research seemed to be headed towards grounded dialogue – using the sensory-motor primitives to inform/drive/””reference resolve” dialogue elements. Finally perhaps situated cognition meets dialogue systems?
Vladmir Popescu presented a fairly complex and complete model for language generation that took into account pragmatics. I found at the time that it was almost too complex, but well, pragmatics is complex intrinsically. As it was for French and exploited many syntactic features, I could not quite follow all the examples, as mon francais ces’t terrible!
Cristine(always remember to say the final “e” of her name) presented the evaluation of a dialogue system in a domotic scenario.
Student presentations were a quite important part of the Summer School, as we were able to get feedback from the professors and senior researchers in the field, as well as our student colleagues.
I should point out that I found particularly fruitful the questions that Jim Larson himself called “Jim Larson’s question 1 and 2”. They were (my paraphrase) “How will you know that your system is working as expected?” and “How will this result contribute to the advancement of the field”. These standard and seemingly easy questions caught some of us off guard, and I see the avoidance in tackling them as a major treat to our field. If we do not know beforehand how we will verify our results, how can we possibly make any claim that is not, well...just a wild guess? The second one is what in a sense separates relevant research from academic mumbo-jumbo. If we forget to think about how our work contributes to the advancement of the field or the solutions to the problems our peers are trying to address, we run the risk of doing a research project that is of little use besides allowing us to go to conferences and be addressed by Dr…
Student presentation sections were chaired by Mike McTear, Ian O’Neil, Ramon Lopez-Cozar, Sebastian Moeller and Wolfgang Minker, all of whom did a great job on steering the presentations, providing their comments and coordinating the participation of the attendees. Many thanks to all of them, as well as to our fellow presenters!
[1] Lela, a friend of mine is about to name her soon-to-be-born daughter Theodora. When you consider that this is in
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