Skip to main content

Generating Dialogues for Virtual Agents Using Nested Textual Coherence Relations

  • Conference paper
Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5208))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

This paper describes recent advances on the Text2Dialogue system we are currently developing. Our system enables automatic transformation of monological text into a dialogue. The dialogue is then “acted out” by virtual agents, using synthetic speech and gestures. In this paper, we focus on the monologue-to-dialogue transformation, and describe how it uses textual coherence relations to map text segments to query–answer pairs between an expert and a layman agent. By creating mapping rules for a few well-selected relations, we can produce coherent dialogues with proper assignment of turns for the speakers in a majority of cases.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. André, E., Rist, T., van Mulken, S., Klesen, M., Baldes, S.: The automated design of believable dialogues for animated presentation teams. In: Embodied Conversational Agents, pp. 220–255. MIT Press, Cambridge (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Cavazza, M., Charles, F.: Dialogue generation in character-based interactive storytelling. In: Proceedings of the AAAI First Annual Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference, Marina Del Rey, California, USA (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Nadamoto, A., Tanaka, K.: Complementing your TV-viewing by web content automatically-transformed into TV-program-type content. In: Procs. 13th Annual ACM Intl. Conf. on Multimedia, pp. 41–50. ACM Press, New York (2005)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  4. Piwek, P., Hernault, H., Prendinger, H., Ishizuka, M.: T2D: Generating dialogues between virtual agents automatically from text. In: Pélachaud, C., Martin, J.-C., André, E., Chollet, G., Karpouzis, K., Pelé, D. (eds.) IVA 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4722, pp. 161–174. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  5. Nischt, M., Prendinger, H., André, E., Ishizuka, M.: MPML3D: A reactive framework for the Multimodal Presentation Markup Language. In: Gratch, J., Young, M., Aylett, R.S., Ballin, D., Olivier, P. (eds.) IVA 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4133, pp. 218–229. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Prendinger, H., Descamps, S., Ishizuka, M.: MPML: A markup language for controlling the behavior of life-like characters. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 15(2), 183–203 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Craig, S., Gholson, B., Ventura, M., Graesser, A.: the Tutoring Research Group: Overhearing dialogues and monologues in virtual tutoring sessions. Intl. Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 11, 242–253 (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Le, H.T., Abeysinghe, G.: A study to improve the efficiency of a discourse parsing system. In: Gelbukh, A. (ed.) CICLing 2003. LNCS, vol. 2588, pp. 101–114. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  9. Soricut, R., Marcu, D.: Sentence level discourse parsing using syntactic and lexical information. In: Procs. HLT/NAACL 2003, Edmonton, Canada (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Mann, W.C., Thompson, S.A.: Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text 8(3), 243–281 (1988)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Carlson, L., Marcu, D.: Discourse tagging reference manual. Technical Report ISI-TR-545, ISI (September 2001)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Helmut Prendinger James Lester Mitsuru Ishizuka

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Hernault, H., Piwek, P., Prendinger, H., Ishizuka, M. (2008). Generating Dialogues for Virtual Agents Using Nested Textual Coherence Relations. In: Prendinger, H., Lester, J., Ishizuka, M. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5208. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85483-8_14

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85483-8_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-85482-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-85483-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics