PhD Research
My PhD research project focuses on computational modelling of dialogue management and non-cooperative conversational behaviour.
Dialogue is usually understood as a collaborative task, in which two or more participants work together in order to achieve a certain goal. Consequently, traditional models of dialogue assume a strong notion of cooperation between the dialogue participants. Concepts like joint actions, shared plans or dialogue games all belong in this tradition, and a series of rather successful research dialogue systems have been implemented based on these models. They all have in common the assumption that participants agree on what they want to achieve with the conversation and that their joint efforts go in that direction. For instance, an example interaction with CMU’s Let’s Go dialogue system is available here.
However, in real life, conversations go seldom so smooth. A great many situations escape the assumptions above and, in these cases, such models will have little to say. My research aims at narrowing this gap by looking carefully at the “odd” cases.
My PhD project has two main tracks: performing empirical investigations on the nature of non-cooperative conversational behaviour in naturally occurring dialogue, and devising an adequate computational model of dialogue management for implementing conversational agents that are able to exhibit such behaviour.
For the empirical analysis I use broadcast political interviews as a source of data. The particular nature of these exchanges, and the usually conflicting goals interviewers and politicians bring to them, provide plenty of interesting situations to work with. A few examples follow:
(Source: BBC NEWS)
(Source: BBC NEWS)
(Source: BBC NEWS)
For more on the kind of analysis I realise on this data, have a look at my ACL-SRW2010 paper Non-Cooperation in Dialogue.
For the modelling and implementation side of the project, I draw on the notions of conversational games and discourse (or social) obligations, and on how they interplay with (selfish) rational agency to produce the kind of behaviour observed in the empirical data.
For more details on my approach, have a look at my FLATLANDS 2011 talk Conversational Games, Discourse Obligations and Non-Cooperative Dialogue.
If you have an interest in any of these issues and want to exchange ideas, please send me an email.
