Simon Worgan

University of Leeds · School of Computing

Live workflow monitoring and the resulting user interaction in industrial settings faces a number of challenges. A formal workflow may be unknown or implicit, data may be sparse and certain isolated actions may be undetectable given current visual feature extraction technology. This paper attempts to address these problems by inducing a structural...

When developing human-computer conversational systems the complex co-acting processes of human-human dialogue present a significant challenge. Para-linguistic features establish rapport between individuals and direct the conversation in directions that cannot be captured by semantic analysis alone. This paper attempts to address part of this challe...

In this paper we present a novel concept for cognitive assistance and training in manual industrial assembly. In the European FP7 project COGNITO, our aim is to design a mobile, personal system, which instructs operators in task solving and tool handling. The system not only provides instructions, but it is also able to understand and induce human...

Several dialogue management (DM) architectures and conversational speech for dialogue systems are presented. Basic types of DM systems include dialogue grammars and frames, plan-based and collaborative systems, and conversational games theory. DM architectures include SmartKom, Trindi, WITAS, CONVERSE, COMIC, agent-based dialogue management, and DM...

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...

In this review of Stephen Cowley’s special issue of Pragmatics & Cognition [Cowley, S.J., 2009. Distributed language and dynamics. Pragmatics & Cognition 17 (3), 495–508] we present an overview of the extensive overlap between the distributed language approach and the development of artificial dialogue systems. After presenting a brief summary of e...

Historically, the field of phonetics has sought to validate competing theories of perception by searching for auditory or articulatory invariants. But speech communication differs from many forms of perception in that it is reciprocal: listeners are also speakers. This reciprocity is typically found in animal signaling systems, where the signal has...

Understanding the human faculty for speech presents a fundamental and complex problem. We do not know how humans decode the rapid speech signal and the origins and evolution of speech remain shrouded in mystery. Speakers generate a continuous stream of sounds apparently devoid of any specifying invariant features. Despite this absence, we can effor...

One does not have to go very far into the subject of artificial intelligence (AI) before deep philosophical issues start to surface. The Turing test, the frame problem, the Chinese room argument, symbol grounding, the role of representation: these are just a few of the topics that have generated intense discussion and debate over the years. One par...

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...

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...

The iterated learning model (ILM), in which a language comes about via communication pressures exerted over successive generations of agents, has attracted much attention in recent years. Its importance lies in the focus on cultural emergence as opposed to biological evolution. The ILM simplifies a compositional language as th e compression of an o...

The alternative phenotype hypothesis contends that multiple phenotypes exist in a single genotype and are expressed by environmental or genetic cues. It further states that these multiple phenotypes will be maintained and improved in a population where the environment is unstable, in spite of the increased cost of this plasticity. In this work we...

The human speech signal contains a wide range of para- linguistic information and the interpretation and exploit ation of this information presents a fascinating challenge. This paper seeks to demonstrate that emotion is central to the construction of an open- ended dialogue system. Emotion forms a useful, practical, metric that enables a agent to...

The traditional view of symbol grounding seeks to connect an a priori internal representation or ‘form’ to its external referent. But such a ‘form’ is usually itself systematically composed out of more primitive parts (i.e., it is ‘symbolic’), so this view ignores its grounding in the physics of the world. Some previous work simulating multiple tal...

Despite ongoing research, the human ability of speech perception remains a mystery. Current phonetic theory is divided by two points of contention: the relationship from production to signal to audition and the object of perception/cognition. Here we discuss the role of current phonetic theory within this debate and propose our own hypothesis. We a...