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Separating Representation, Reasoning, and Implementation for Interaction Management: Lessons from Automated Planning

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Dialogues with Social Robots

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 427))

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Abstract

Numerous toolkits are available for developing speech-based dialogue systems. We survey a range of currently available toolkits, highlighting the different facilities provided by each. Most of these toolkits include not only a method for representing states and actions, but also a mechanism for reasoning about and selecting the actions, often combined with a technical framework designed to simplify the task of creating end-to-end systems. This near-universal tight coupling of representation, reasoning, and implementation in a single toolkit makes it difficult both to compare different approaches to dialogue system design, as well as to analyse the properties of individual techniques. We contrast this situation with the state of the art in a related research area—automated planning—where a set of common representations have been defined and are widely used to enable direct comparison of different reasoning approaches. We argue that adopting a similar separation would greatly benefit the dialogue research community.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This differs somewhat from the task of interaction management, where the goal is (usually) to find the next system action, rather than a complete action sequence. However, we note that a system that is able to achieve the latter can also be used in the former context.

  2. 2.

    http://www.icaps-conference.org/.

  3. 3.

    http://planning.domains/.

  4. 4.

    http://jamesproject.eu/.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been partially funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant no. 270435 (JAMES, http://james-project.eu/) and grant no. 610917 (STAMINA, http://stamina-robot.eu/), and by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant no. 688147 (MuMMER, http://mummer-project.eu/).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Mary Ellen Foster

  2. Department of Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK

    Ronald P. A. Petrick

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Correspondence to Mary Ellen Foster .

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  1. Institute of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki Institute of Behavioural Sciences, Helsinki, Finland

    Kristiina Jokinen

  2. University of Helsinki , Helsinki, Finland

    Graham Wilcock

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Foster, M.E., A. Petrick, R.P. (2017). Separating Representation, Reasoning, and Implementation for Interaction Management: Lessons from Automated Planning. In: Jokinen, K., Wilcock, G. (eds) Dialogues with Social Robots. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 427. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2585-3_7

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