We offer a PhD position in the field of computational semantics,
entitled "Predicting discourse moves".

Supervisors : Marta Abrusan <abrusan@irit.fr> Nicholas Asher
<asher@irit.fr>, IRIT group : MELODI

Description:

Interaction with automated dialogue systems is ever more present in
every day life. Yet, our understanding of the theoretical and
computational aspects of interactive dialogues is still limited. We
propose a project in this domain.

The project is based on the Settlers corpus, which was conceived as a
tool for studying the nature of strategic conversation within the STAC
project (http://www.irit.fr/STAC/index.html). Settlers of Catan is a
win-lose game in which players use resources, e.g. wood, ore and
sheep, to build roads and settlements. In the course of the game the
players negotiate for these resources. Our corpus consists of the
records of these negotiation dialogues (over 900 dialogues), as well
as the records of the trades and computer-dealt resources. The corpus
records both the linguistic and the non-linguistic environment in
which dialogue moves are made. The records of the negotiation
dialogues have been annotated for their rhetorical structure using the
rhetorical model of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT,
Asher and Lascarides 2003). Machine learning experiments have been
also performed to automatically infer the rhetorical structure of
dialogues.

The thesis project we propose draws on the results in STAC and aims at
predicting the next move in a Settlers game based on the linguistic
and the non-linguistic context. It has both a computational and a
theoretical aspects. The computational aspect draws on the results of
the machine learning experiments to predict the type of the most
coherent follow-up discourse move. The theoretical aspects include (a)
the understanding and calculation of strategic interests of
conversational participants in a game theoretical setting using models
that have been developed to deal with non-cooperative settings (b)
further development of the formal rules of discourse coherence in a
conversation, taking into account presuppositions, topicality and
focus structure (c) the theoretical integration of the linguistic and
non-linguistic information in a dialogue.

For more information, contact Marta Abrusan <abrusan@irit.fr> or
Nicholas Asher <asher@irit.fr>.