Demonstration of a prototype for a conversational companion for reminiscing about images

Abstract

This paper describes an initial prototype demonstrator of a Companion, designed as a platform for novel approaches to the following: 1) The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) phase, 2) The conversion of the input to Resource Descriptor Format (RDF) to allow the generation of new facts from existing ones, under the control of a Dialogue Manger (DM), that also has access to stored knowledge and to open knowledge accessed in real time from the web, all in RDF form, 3) A DM implemented as a stack and network virtual machine that models mixed initiative in dialogue control, and 4) A tuned dialogue act detector based on corpus evidence. The prototype platform was evaluated, and we describe this briefly; it is also designed to support more extensive forms of emotion detection carried by both speech and lexical content, as well as extended forms of machine learning.