Towards Negotiative Dialogue for the Talkamatic Dialogue Manager

The paper describes a number of dialogue phenomena associated with negotiative dialogue, as implemented in a development version of the Talkamatic Dialogue Manager (TDM). This implementation is an initial step towards full coverage of general features of negotiative dialogue in TDM.

Topic and genre in dialogue

In this paper we argue that topic plays a fundamental role in conversations, and that the concept is needed in addition to that of genre to define interactions. In particular, the concepts of genre and topic need to be separated and orthogonally defined. This would enable modular, reliable and controllable flexible-domain dialogue systems.

We went to look for meaning and all we got were these lousy representations: aspects of meaning representation for computational semantics

In this paper we examine different meaning representations that are commonly used in different natural language applications today and discuss their limits, both in terms of the aspects of the natural language meaning they are modelling and in terms of the aspects of the application for which they are used.