Debora Field

University of Oxford | OX · Department of Computer Science

This paper takes a philosophical look at how one might use insights from examining the nature of action in order to help in defining a set of multi-modal communicative actions for use in and by embodied conversational agents. A key theme of the paper is the central importance of intention in communicative actions. The paper also offers some suggest...

We are interested in the ways that language is used to achieve a variety of goals, where the same utterance may have vastly different consequences in different situations. This is closely related to the topic of creativity in language. The fact that the same utterance can be used to achieve a variety of goals opens up the possibility of using it to...

This paper presents an alternative to the 'speech acts with STRIPS' approach to implementing dialogue: a fully implemented AI planner which generates and analyses the semantics of utterances using a single linguistic act for all con- texts. Using this act, the planner can model problematic conversational situations, including felicitous and infelic...

This paper discusses the design of a planner whose intended application required us to solve the so-called 'ramification problem'. The planner was designed for the purpose of plan- ning communicative actions, whose effects are famously un- knowable and unobservable by the doer/speaker, and depend on the beliefs of and inferences made by the observe...

This paper reports on an essay-writing study using a technical system that has been developed to generate automated feedback on academic essays. The system operates through the combination of a linguistic analysis engine, which processes the text in the essay, and a web application that uses the output of the linguistic analysis engine to generate...

Students have varying levels of experience and understanding, and need support to inform them of expectations and guide their learning efforts. Feedback is critical in this process. This study focused on the effects of providing different types of feedback on participants’ written essays and on participants’ motivations for learning using measures...

This paper focuses on the use of a natural language analytics engine to provide feedback to students when preparing an essay for summative assessment. OpenEssayist is a real-time learning analytics tool, which operates through the combination of a linguistic analysis engine that processes the text in the essay, and a web application that uses the o...

OpenEssayist is an automated feedback system designed to support university students as they write essays for assessment. A first generation prototype of this system was tested on a cohort of postgraduate distance learners at the UK Open University from September to December 2013. A case study approach was used to examine three participants’ experi...

This paper describes the design and rationale behind a classification scheme for English margin comments. The scheme's design was informed by pragmatics and pedagogy theory, and by observations made from a corpus of 24,387 margin comments from assessed university assignments. The purpose of the scheme is to computationally explore content and form...

This paper reports the findings of an empirical investigation, which set out to test a set of rainbow essay exercises The rainbow diagrams are pictorial representations of formal graphs that are derived automatically from student essays .They were designed to allow students to discover how key concepts in a well written essay are connected together...

The SAFeSEA project (Supportive Automated Feedback for Short Essay Answers) aims to develop an automated feedback system to support university students as they write summative essays. Empirical studies carried out in the initial phase of the system’s development illuminated students’ approaches to and understandings of the essay-writing process. Fi...

This paper presents observations that were made about a corpus of 135 graded student essays by analysing them with a computer program that we are designing to provide automated formative feedback on draft essays. In order to provide individualised feedback to help students to improve their essays, the program carries out automatic essay structure r...

This paper reports on the SAFeSEA project (Supportive Automated Feedback for Short Essay Answers), conducted by the Open University and Oxford University, which set out to assist students in writing draft essays. The project explored a number of feedback mechanisms to facilitate this process. One such mechanism was investigating how to offer suppor...

OpenEssayist is an automated, interactive feedback system designed to provide an acceptable level of support for students as they write essays for summative assessment. There are two main components to the system: (1) a linguistic analysis engine and (2) a web application that generates feedback for students The main pedagogical challenge in the e-...

This paper reports on an application that delivers automated formative feedback designed to help university students improve their assignments. The aim of the system is to improve the confidence and skills of the user by promoting self-directed learning through metacognition. The system focuses on the content of an essay by using automatic summaris...

This paper presents observations that were made about a corpus of 135 graded student essays by analysing them with a computer program that we are designing to provide automated formative feedback on draft essays. In order to provide individualised feedback to help students to improve their essays, the program carries out automatic essay structure r...

The SAFeSEA project (Supportive Automated Feedback for Short Essay Answers) aims to develop an automated feedback system to support university students as they write summative essays. Empirical studies carried out in the initial phase of the system’s development illuminated students’ approaches to and understandings of the essay-writing process. Fi...

This paper reports on progress on the design of OpenEssayist, a web application that aims at supporting students in writing essays. The system uses techniques from Natural Language Processing to automatically extract summaries from free-text essays, such as key words and key sentences, and carries out essay structure recognition. The current design...

OpenEssayist is a system which is currently under development. It aims to provide an effective automated interactive feedback system that yields an acceptable level of support for university students writing summative essays. The principal natural language processing technique currently employed is extractive summarisation using graph-based ranking...

We present an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) that incorporates a context-sensitive mechanism for handling user barge-in. The affective ECA engages the user in social conversation, and is fully implemented. We will use actual examples of system behaviour to illustrate. The ECA is designed to recognise and be empathetic to the emotional state of...

The new field of machine ethics is concerned with giving machines ethical principles, or a procedure for discovering a way to resolve the ethical dilemmas they might encounter, enabling them to function in an ethically responsible manner through their own ethical decision making. Developing ethics for machines, in contrast to developing ethics for...

This paper describes an initial prototype of the Companions project (www.companions-project.org): the Senior Companion (SC), designed to be a platform to display novel approaches to:(1)The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an ASR phase.(2)The conversion of the input to RDF for...

Multimodal conversational dialogue systems consisting of numerous software components create challenges for the underlying software architecture and development practices. Typically, such systems are built on separate, often preexisting components developed by different organizations and integrated in a highly iterative way. The traditional dialogu...

This paper presents a dialogue system in the form of an ECA that acts as a sociable and emotionally intelligent companion for the user. The system dialogue is not task-driven but is social conversation in which the user talks about his/her day at the office. During conversations the system monitors the emotional state of the user and uses that info...

The Senior Companion (SC) is a fully implemented Windows application intended for intermittent use by one user only (a senior citizen) over potentially many years. The thinking behind the SC is to make a device that will give its owner comfort, company, entertainment, and some practical functions. The SC will typically be installed at home, either...

The work reported here arises from an attempt to provide a body of simple information about diet and its effect on various common medical conditions. Expressing this knowledge in natural language has a number of advantages. It also raises a number of difficult issues. We will consider solutions, and partial solutions, to these issues below.

We present a mechanism to learn repeated substructures of dialogue from an appropriately annotated dialogue corpus. We hypothesised that we could automatically segment a dialogue corpus into ‘chunks ’ corresponding roughly to ‘game’-like structures. In our dialogue system we manage dialogue by employing a set of hand-crafted networks (ATNs) which w...

There has recently been a great deal of work aimed at trying to extract information from substantial texts for tasks such as question answering. Much of this work has dealt with texts which are reasonably large, but which are known to contain reliable relevant information, e.g. FAQ lists, on-line encyclopaedias, rather than looking at huge unorgani...

Work on speech acts has generally involved the introduction of sets of different actions such as informing, reminding, bluffing and lying. These actions have different preconditions and effects, and hence can be used to achieve a wide variety of different real-world goals. The problem is that they tend to have indistinguishable surface forms. As su...

Work on speech acts has generally involved the introduction of sets of different actions such as informing, reminding, bluffing, and lying, which have different preconditions and effects, and hence can be used to achieve a wide variety of different real-world goals. They tend to have indistinguishable surface forms, however. As such, it is extremel...

This paper discusses an implemented dialogue system which generates the meanings of utterances by taking into account: the surface mood of the user's last utterance; the meanings of all the user's utterances from the current discourse; the system's expert knowledge; and the system's beliefs about the current situation arising from the discourse (in...

This paper discusses a planner of the semantics of utterances, whose essential design is an epistemic theorem prover. The planner was designed for the purpose of planning communicative actions, whose efiects are famously unknowable and unobservable by the doer/speaker, and depend on the beliefs of and inferences made by the recipient/hearer. The fu...

This paper presents a reasoning-centred approach to planning: an AI planner that can achieve blocks-world goals of the form 'above(X,Y)' by knowing that 'above' is the transitive closure of 'on', and using that knowledge to reason over the effects of ac-tions. The fully implemented model can achieve goals that do not match action effects, but that...

This extended abstract introduces research into persuasive dialogue modelling which is to be carried out as part of PIPS, one of the five Integrated Projects funded from the first call of the EU 6th Framework Programme in the field of e-Health. One of PIPS’ aims is to design and build a personal computational advisory system to support European Cit...

Computer technology is increasingly bringing information which was previously the preserve of experts into people's homes. We address the question of whether Artificial Intelligence can make accessible, to ordinary individuals, expert help in ethical decision-making. We propose an Ethical Decision Assistant and raise some important issues its desig...