Proceedings of the 7th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, page 36,
Sydney, July 2006. c©2006 Association for Computational Linguistics
Invited Talk
Content Recognition in Dialogue
Jonathan Ginzburg
Dept of Computer Science
King’s College London
The Strand London WC2R 2LS
email: ginzburg@dcs.kcl.ac.uk
Abstract
Deciding what is the content of an utterance in dialogue is a potentially
tricky business: should it be an entity computed using (solely/primarily)
grammatical information or is it determined by recognition of participant
intention using domain level inference? The decisions one makes on this
score play a crucial role in any model of the interaction involved in ground-
ing an utterance. Integrating the clarificatory potential of an utterance into
the grounding process transforms the issue of content recognition into a
more concrete issue: grammatically determined content has markedly dis-
tinct clarificatory potential from content determined using domain level in-
ference. This leads to a new challenge: how to integrate the two types of
content in such a way that both enables their distinct clarificatory potential
to be maintained and allows content determined by domain level inference
to feature in grounding. My talk will address this challenge.
36
