Introduction to the Special Issue on Computational Dialogue Modelling
Francesco Cutugno, Hendrik Buschmeier · Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics · 2021
This special issue on 'Computational Dialogue Modelling' discusses recent approaches for modelling pragmatics and common ground in spoken human-human and humanmachine interaction.Natural Language Processing (NLP), given the most recent scientific discoveries in the area of intelligent systems and distributed semantics, is now able to build interactive agents whose performance is getting more powerful from year to year.Simple 'command-based' models and dialogue state tracking methods are now widely available for very constrained tasks and domains and research in NLP is heading towards the design of more complex scenarios that need to take into account the role of pragmatics in dialogue systems as well as of grounding and common ground.To give an example, investigating the role of pragmatics for dialogue systems enables them to adopt linguistic strategies that make internal states more observable.For example, inconsistencies between a conversational agent's internal representations and perceived contextual evidence can become visible by adopting specific superficial forms.Applying computational models of pragmatics to dialogue system design requires more complex approaches to knowledge representation and inference modelling, which can then enable conversational agents to use context-specific clarification strategies, allowing systems to be more robust as inconsistencies can be addressed efficiently.For the future, the field aims at surpassing the basic, task-oriented, applications in order to deal with more complex dialogue situations using more general structures.Managing conflicts in the internal representations among agents involved in the interactionboth human and artificialis of critical importance for a more natural, acceptable user experience when interacting with technical systems with natural language-based interfaces.This is a special double issue which collects ten contributions.It opens with an invited contribution by Kopp and Varonina, who provide a survey on the main theme of the issue: theories and models of Common Ground establishment in dialogue systems.The article is accompanied by a light debate starting from a number of questions raised by Cutugno and Di Maro, followed by a reply of the authors.The remaining nine articles are organised in two sections: 'Corpus Studies' and 'Technological Models'.The five articles in the Corpus Studies section deal with the collection, description, or analysis of various corpora, ranging from multimodal interactions to sentiment analysis, from morality to proactivity, and grounding.Although some aspects of pragmatics have already received more attention than others, all the phenomena investigated are essential for future applications showing human-like communicative competence.For