LING 575 A - Discourse & Dialogue
Spring 2011
HW #1: Due Noon 4/13
Goals
- Begin to develop the topic for your course project.
- Identify articles to guide your work.
Project Areas
Your project may explore any of the broad areas in Discourse and Dialog
identified in the course syllabus, including:
- Reference and Coreference
- Discourse Structure Modeling and Recognition
- Dialogue Structure and Recognition
- Dialogue Systems, Management, and Evaluation
- Dialogue Stylistics, Politeness, etc
Please see the discussion on the project information page for more detail on the different requirements for General Linguistics and
Computational Linguistics elective credit in this course.
Literature Survey
You should identify 3 papers to start your investigation of your topic
and refine your ideas. You may use the bibliography sections of
the survey chapters Chapters 21 and 24 in the Jurafsky and Martin text,
the class readings in the syllabus and
bibliography page as a starting point. The ACL SIGDial workshops on Discourse and Dialogue are also a good
source of information on this area.
Topic Ideas
A few ideas are listed below and were also discussed in April 6's
class.
- Analytic
- Analyze reference behavior in a:
- Different language
- Different register/style
E.g. patterns of pronominal reference in Chat
- Investigate conversation style in SDS
- Politeness, misunderstandings, vocabulary
- Evaluate predictions for dialogue behavior
- Amount of overlap and register/familiarity/language
- Analyze in depth a set of discourse structure models
- Computational
- Implement a spoken language interface
- Implement/extend a discourse segmentation algorithm
- Develop an automatic recognition system for some aspect of speaking style
- Improve dialogue act recognition by improving the modeling of dialogue history
Project Resources
There are a large number of excellent resources for projects in
this area, including:
- Spoken Dialogue Toolkits and Open Source Systems
- Discourse Annotated Materials
- Spoken Dialogue Systems Corpora
- Communicator 2000, 2001 (LDC)
- Coreference Annotated Corpora (MUC, ACE)
- Discourse Segment Annotated Corpora (TDT, Choi's dataset)
- Dialogue Act Annotated Corpora (ICSI Meeting Corpus, HCRC Maptask corpus, AMI)
- Etc...
Handing Things In
You should post a brief description of your
topic ideas - one paragraph to one page, any format - to
the GoPost in the Topic Ideas discussion area. Please list the three starting
point reference papers that you have selected. If you have not already
done so, please post to the 'Elective Choice' thread indicating which
type of elective credit you expect from the course.
Please try to read over each other's postings to prepare for class.
Be prepared to discuss your topic ideas briefly in class on April 13.
It's fine if your plans are still a bit vague; we'll use the class discussion
to try to provide some more ideas and feedback.