NLP@Pitt

Ph.D. proposal defense - Mihai Rotaru

CANDIDATE: Mihai Rotaru
TITLE: Applications of Discourse Structure for Spoken Dialogue Systems
WHEN: Tuesday, March 20, 1 pm
WHERE: 5317 Sennott Hall (5th floor conference room)

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Diane J. Litman (advisor)
Rebecca Hwa
Carolyn P. Rosé
Janyce M. Wiebe

ABSTRACT:
Just as words in a utterance are organized in a structure (e.g. syntactic, semantic), utterances in a discourse (monologue or dialogue) are organized in structure called the discourse structure. Our proposed work investigates the utility of discourse structure for spoken dialogue systems (computer systems that interact with users via speech).

Two types of applications are being pursued: on the system side and on the user side. On the system side, we investigate if the discourse structure information is useful for various spoken dialogue system tasks: performance analysis, characterization of user affect and characterization of speech recognition problems. On the user side, we investigate whether the discourse structure information is useful for users through a graphical representation of the discourse structure.

QA with Attitude: Exploiting Opinion Type Analysis for Improving Question Answering

Speaker: Swapna Somasundaran

Room : Board room ( 6th floor - room 6329) Sennot Square

Time : 9:00 am

Practice talk for ICWSM-07.

Abstract
In this work, we explore the utility of attitude types for improving question answering (QA) on both web-based discussions and news data. We present a set of attitude types developed with an eye toward QA and show that they can be reliably annotated. Using the attitude annotations, we develop automatic classifiers for recognizing two main types of attitudes: sentiment and arguing. Finally, we exploit information about the attitude types of questions and answers for improving opinion QA with promising results.