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10th International
Conference on Soft
Computing Models
in Industrial and
Environmental
Applications
Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing
Volume 368
Series editor
Janusz Kacprzyk, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
e-mail: kacprzyk@ibspan.waw.pl
About this Series
The series “Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing” contains publications on theory,
applications, and design methods of Intelligent Systems and Intelligent Computing. Virtually
all disciplines such as engineering, natural sciences, computer and information science, ICT,
economics, business, e-commerce, environment, healthcare, life science are covered. The list
of topics spans all the areas of modern intelligent systems and computing.
The publications within “Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing” are primarily
textbooks and proceedings of important conferences, symposia and congresses. They cover
significant recent developments in the field, both of a foundational and applicable character.
An important characteristic feature of the series is the short publication time and world-wide
distribution. This permits a rapid and broad dissemination of research results.
Advisory Board
Chairman
Nikhil R. Pal, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India
e-mail: nikhil@isical.ac.in
Members
Rafael Bello, Universidad Central “Marta Abreu” de Las Villas, Santa Clara, Cuba
e-mail: rbellop@uclv.edu.cu
Emilio S. Corchado, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain
e-mail: escorchado@usal.es
Hani Hagras, University of Essex, Colchester, UK
e-mail: hani@essex.ac.uk
László T. Kóczy, Széchenyi István University, Győr, Hungary
e-mail: koczy@sze.hu
Vladik Kreinovich, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, USA
e-mail: vladik@utep.edu
Chin-Teng Lin, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
e-mail: ctlin@mail.nctu.edu.tw
Jie Lu, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
e-mail: Jie.Lu@uts.edu.au
Patricia Melin, Tijuana Institute of Technology, Tijuana, Mexico
e-mail: epmelin@hafsamx.org
Nadia Nedjah, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
e-mail: nadia@eng.uerj.br
Ngoc Thanh Nguyen, Wroclaw University of Technology, Wroclaw, Poland
e-mail: Ngoc-Thanh.Nguyen@pwr.edu.pl
Jun Wang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong
e-mail: jwang@mae.cuhk.edu.hk
123
Editors
Álvaro Herrero Héctor Quintián
Department of Civil Engineering University of Salamanca
University of Burgos Salamanca
Burgos Spain
Spain
Emilio Corchado
Javier Sedano University of Salamanca
Technological Institute of Castilla y León Salamanca
Burgos Spain
Spain
Bruno Baruque
Department of Civil Engineering
University of Burgos
Burgos
Spain
v
vi Preface
warm gratitude to all the Special Sessions chairs for their continuing support to the
SOCO Series of conferences.
We would like to thank all the Special Session organizers, contributing authors,
as well as the members of the Program Committees and the Local Organizing
Committee for their hard and highly valuable work. Their work has helped to
contribute to the success of the SOCO 2015 event. We are proud of successfully
organizing the tenth edition of this remarkable and appealing conference.
Organization
General Chair
Honorary Chairs
Local Chair
vii
viii SOCO 2015
Program Committee
Special Sessions
Organising Committee
Applications
xv
xvi Contents
Intelligent Systems
Abstract In this paper, we test the applicability of a statistical user modeling tech-
nique to develop a simulated user agent that generates dialogs which are similar
to real human-machine spoken interactions. The proposed user simulation technique
decides the next response of the agent taking into account the previous user turns, the
last system answer and the objective of the dialog. In our contribution, we present the
results of the comparison between a corpus acquired from real interactions of users
with a conversational agent and a corpus acquired by means of the proposed user
simulation technique. To do so, we describe the practical application of our pro-
posal for a conversational agent providing tourist information in natural language,
employing a comprehensive set of measures for its evaluation.
1 Introduction
The user simulator that we present in this paper replaces the user agent by simulating
the user intention level, that is, the simulator provides concepts and attributes that
represent the intention of the user utterance. Therefore, the user simulator carries out
the functions of the Automatic Speech Recognizer (ASR) and the Natural Language
Understanding (NLU) modules of a spoken conversational agent. The user responses
are generated taking into account the information provided by the simulator through-
out the history of the dialog, the last system turn, and the objective(s) predefined for
the dialog.
In order to control the interaction, our user simulator uses the representation
the dialogs as a sequence of pairs (Ai , Ui ), where Ai is the output of the conver-
sational agent (the system response) at time i, expressed in terms of dialog acts;
and Ui is the semantic representation of the user turn (the result of the understand-
ing process of the user input) at time i. This way, each dialog is represented by
(A1 , U1 ), … , (Ai , Ui ), … , (An , Un ), where A1 is the greeting turn of the system (the
first turn of the dialog), and Un is the last user turn. We refer to a pair (Ai , Ui ) as Si ,
the state of the dialog sequence at time i.
The lexical, syntactic and semantic information associated to the speaker u’s ith
turn (Ui ) is usually represented by:
6 D. Griol and J.M. Molina
For the study presented in this paper, we have improved this agent using a model
for introducing errors based on the method presented in [16]. The generation of
confidence scores is carried out separately from the model employed for error gen-
eration. This model is represented as a communication channel by means of a gener-
ative probabilistic model P(c, au |̃au ), where au is the true incoming user dialog act
ã u is the recognized hypothesis, and c is the confidence score associated with this
hypothesis.
The probability P(̃au |au ) is obtained by Maximum-Likelihood using the ini-
tial labeled corpus acquired with real users and considers the recognized sequence
of words wu and the actual sequence uttered by the user w̃ u . This probability is
decomposed into a component that generates a word-level utterance from a given
user dialog act, a model that simulates ASR confusions (learned from the refer-
ence transcriptions and the ASR outputs), and a component that models the semantic
decoding process.
∑ ∑
P(̃au |au ) = P(au |w̃ u ) P(w̃ u |wu )P(wu |au )
w̃ u wu
A maximum number of user turns per dialog is defined for acquiring a corpus
using our user simulator. A user request for closing the dialog is selected once
the system has provided the information defined in the objective(s) of the dialog.
The simulated dialogs are automatically considered unsuccessful when the follow-
ing conditions take place: (i) The dialog exceeds a maximum number of user turns;
(ii) The response selected by the conversational agent corresponds with a query not
required by the user simulator; (iii) The conversational agent provides an error warn-
ing because the user simulator has not provided the mandatory information needed
to carry out a specific query; (iv) The conversational agent provides a error warn-
ing when the selected response involves the use of a data not provided by the user
simulator.
We have applied our proposal to develop and evaluate the adaptive system Enjoy Your
City, which provides tourist information in natural language in Spanish. The infor-
mation provided by the system includes places of interest, weather forecast, hotel
booking, restaurants and bars, shopping, street guide and “how to get there” function-
8 D. Griol and J.M. Molina
alities, cultural activities (cinema, theater, music, exhibitions, literature and science),
sport activities, festivities, and public transportation. The system has been developed
using an hybrid dialog management approach that combines the VoiceXML standard
with user modeling and statistical estimation of optimized dialog strategies [17]. The
information offered to the user is extracted from different web pages and several data-
bases are also used to store this information and automatically update the data that
is included in the application.
We have defined ten concepts to represent the different queries that the user
can perform (Places-Interest, Weather-Forecast, Hotel-Booking, Restaurants-Bars,
Shopping, Street-how-toget, Cultural, Sport, Festivities, and Public-Transport).
Three task-independent concepts have also been defined for the task (Acceptance,
Negation, and Not-Understood). A total of 115 system actions (dialog acts) were
defined taking into account the information that is required by the system to provide
the requested information.
The UR defined for the task is a sequence of 129 fields:
– The 10 concepts defined for the dialog act representation;
– The total of 115 possible attributes for the concepts;
– The 3 task-independent concepts that users can provide (Acceptance, Negation,
and Not-Understood).
A set of 100 dialogs was acquired with the Enjoy Your City system by means of
its interaction with 20 recruited users. These users followed a set of scenarios that
specifies a set of objectives that must be fulfilled by the user at the end of the dialog
and are designed to include the complete set of functionalities previously described
for the system. The acquisition process resulted in a spontaneous Spanish speech
dialog corpus with 60 different speakers. The total number of user turns was 422.
The recorded material has a duration of 150 min. Figure 1 shows an example of a
dialog extracted from this corpus. Turns with S refer to system turns, and turns with
U refer to user turns.
S1: Welcome to Enjoy Your City Granada. How can I help you?
U1: I want to know about cultural activities for today.
S2: There are more than 10 activities. To hear the complete list say list. To hear
about a specific kind of activity say cinema, theater, music, exhibition, literature or
science.
U2: Science.
S3: There is one activity: conference about transgenic food in Palacio de la Madraza
at 20:00. Do you want to know about any other activities?
U3: Yes, literature.
S4: There are two activities: conference on Scandinavian black novels in Biblioteca
de Andalucı́a at 19:00 and conference on the Gold Century in Faculty of Philosophy
at 19:00. Do you want to know about any other activities?
U4: No, thank you.
S5: Have a nice day!
Fig. 1 An example of a dialog acquired with the interaction of the Enjoy Your City system with
recruited users
User Modeling Optimization for the Conversational … 9
The semantics selected for the conversational agent is represented through the
115 possible system responses defined for the task. The selection of the possible
user responses for the user simulator was carried out using the semantics defined
for the user in the NLU module. A dialog corpus of 3,000 successful dialogs was
acquired using the user agent simulator following the same set of scenarios defined
for the acquisition with real users.
We have defined a set of measures to carry out the evaluation of the acquired cor-
pus based on prior work in the dialog literature. A comprehensive set of quantitative
evaluation measures to compare two dialog corpus is proposed in [13, 14]. These
measures were adapted for use in our comparisons, based on the information avail-
able in our corpus. This set of proposed measures are divided into three types:
– High-level dialog features: These features evaluate how long the dialogs last, how
much information is transmitted in individual turns, and how active the dialog
participants are.
– Dialog style/cooperativeness measures: These measures try to analyze the fre-
quency of different speech acts and study what proportion of actions is goal-
directed, what part is taken up by dialog formalities, etc.
– Task success/efficiency measures: These measures study the goal achievement
rates and goal completion times.
We defined six high-level dialog features for the evaluation of the dialogs: the
average number of turns per dialog, the percentage of different dialogs without con-
sidering the attribute values, the number of repetitions of the most seen dialog, the
number of turns of the most seen dialog, the number of turns of the shortest dialog,
and the number of turns of the longest dialog. Using these measures, we tried to
evaluate the success of the simulated dialogs as well as its efficiency and variability
with regard to the different objectives.
For dialog style features, we define and count a set of system/user dialog acts. On
the system side, we have measured the confirmation of concepts and attributes, ques-
tions to require information, and system answers generated after a database query.
We have not take into account the opening and closing system turns. On the user side,
we have measured the percentage of turns in which the user carries out a request to
the system, provide information, confirms a concept or attribute, Yes/No answers,
and other answers not included in the previous categories.
To compare the two corpus, we compute the mean value for each corpus with
respect to each of the evaluation measures shown in the previous section. We then
use two-tailed t-tests to compare the means across the two corpus as described in
[14]. All differences reported as statistically significant have p-values less than 0.05
after Bonferroni corrections.
10 D. Griol and J.M. Molina
As stated in the previous section, the first group of experiments covers the following
statistical properties: (i) Dialog length, measured in the average number of turns per
dialog, number of turns of the shortest dialog, number of turns of the longest dialog,
and number of turns of the most seen dialog; (ii) Different dialogs in each corpus,
measured in the percentage of different dialogs and the number of repetitions of the
most seen dialog; (iii) Turn length, measured in the number of actions per turn; (iv)
Participant activity as a ratio of system and user actions per dialog.
Table 1 shows the results of the comparison of the high-level dialog features. It
can be seen that all measures have similar values in both corpus. The more signifi-
cant difference is the average number of user turns. In the four types of scenarios, the
dialogs acquired using the simulation technique are shorter than the dialogs acquired
with real users. This can be explained because of the fact that there is a set of the
dialogs acquired with real users in which the user asked for additional information
not included in the definition of the corresponding scenario once the dialog objec-
tives had been achieved.
Table 1 Results of the high-level dialog features defined for the comparison of the two corpus
Initial corpus Simulated corpus
Average number of user turns 7.98 6.75
per dialog
Percentage of different dialogs 84.61 % 78.43 %
Number of repetitions of the 7 9
most seen dialog
Number of turns of the most 2 2
seen dialog
Number of turns of the 2 2
shortest dialog
Number of turns of the longest 16 12
dialog
Tables 2 and 3 respectively show the frequency of the most dominant user and system
dialog acts. Table 2 shows the results of this comparison for the system dialog acts.
It can be observed that there are also only slightly differences between the values
obtained for both corpus. There is a higher percentage of confirmations and questions
in the corpus acquired with real users due the higher average number of turns per
dialog in this corpus.
User Modeling Optimization for the Conversational … 11
Table 3 shows the results of this comparison for the user dialog acts. The most
significant difference between both corpus is the percentage of turns in which the
user makes a request to the system. The percentage of these kind answers is lower in
the corpus acquired with real users. This can be explained by the fact that it is less
probable that simulated users provide useless information, as it is shown in the lower
percentage of the users turns classified as Other answers.
Table 2 Percentages of the different types of system dialog acts in both corpus
Initial corpus Simulated corpus
Confirmation of concepts and 13.51 % 12.23 %
attributes
Questions to require 18.44 % 16.57 %
information
Answers generated after a 68.05 % 71.20 %
database query
Table 3 Percentages of the different types of system dialog acts in both corpus
Initial corpus Simulated corpus
Request to the system 31.74 % 35.43 %
Provide information 21.72 % 20.98 %
Confirmation 10.81 % 9.34 %
Yes/No answers 33.47 % 32.77 %
Other answers 2.26 % 1.48 %
5 Conclusions
In this paper, we have described an approach for the modeling of users interacting
with conversational interfaces. The proposed statistical methodology allows evaluat-
ing this kind of systems by means of the automatic generation of dialogs, which allow
detecting errors in the definition of the dialog strategy of the system and improve
their operation. We consider that our proposal is specially important for current com-
mercial spoken conversational systems and dialog systems currently developed fol-
lowing the industrial standards. The application of our proposal to these systems
allow not only detecting communication errors and possible misunderstood system
responses, but also generating systems adapted to the users’ specific requirements
and preferences.
We have presented an application of our proposal for a practical system based on
a comparison between two corpus acquired using two different techniques. First, we
acquired an initial dialog corpus by means of the interaction of our dialog system
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VII
Huit jours plus tard, de toutes ces visions, rien n’était resté dans
la tête de la jeune femme.
Le lendemain matin même, la clarté du jour avait dissipé comme
un rêve le souvenir de ces réalités.
Elle disait à l’abbé :
— Est-ce moi, Monsieur l’abbé, qui suis cause de ce grand
malheur ? Voyons, la comtesse écoutait. Comment prévoir cela ?
Que dirait-on si l’on me surprenait faisant une chose pareille ? Et
puis, suis-je allée chercher Paul pour cette discussion ? C’est lui qui
a commencé… Si vous aviez vu et entendu ! Il m’a exaspérée : j’ai
répliqué. Et si ce n’est pas lui qui a frappé au cœur sa malheureuse
mère, mettons-nous que ce soit nous ; mais ce n’est pas moi seule.
Voilà, Monsieur l’abbé, ce qu’il faut bien lui dire.
Ces beaux raisonnements positifs, elle les fit accepter sans peine
à Albert, qu’elle put voir, chez lui, à qui elle put parler un instant en
particulier, dans un coin du salon, tandis que Paul, causant avec
Madame de Barjols, n’osait pas les interrompre, — pour ne pas
inquiéter la vieille dame.
L’abbé, lui, répondait à cette dialectique :
— C’est fort bien raisonné, cela, ma pauvre enfant, mais
beaucoup trop bien ! Ne comprenez-vous pas que Paul s’est fait tous
ces reproches ? Toutes ces choses, il se les est dites à lui-même. Ce
n’est pas à vous de les dire, ni de les penser. La générosité, la
tendresse, le pardon, l’amour, sont plus grands que la justice, ma
pauvre enfant, plus grands par conséquent que la justesse des
meilleurs raisonnements les mieux arrangés par la parole. Il faut
aimer. L’amour éclaire tout d’une autre lumière… Mais il faut
découvrir l’amour soi-même. Cherchez en vous. Résistez au passé.
Cherchez l’éternel.
Alors, l’ancienne Rita renaissait. Elle commençait à le trouver
ennuyeux, l’abbé… « Il me manquait celui-là. Ça n’était déjà pas si
drôle… Et, à présent, me revoilà en deuil… Ah ! non ! ça n’est pas
gai, l’existence… Pas même moyen d’aller au spectacle ! »
Berthe était revenue la voir. C’est à elle qu’elle parlait ainsi.
Elle sentait bien que même son repentir ne lui rendrait pas son
mari. Il y avait entre eux maintenant la mort de la comtesse. Cet
obstacle-là était certainement infranchissable. Alors ? — Alors, n’est-
ce pas, elle ne pouvait pourtant pas renoncer à la vie ?… Elle avait
eu joliment raison de se ménager une issue pour sortir de cet
abîme : Albert, lui seul, devait l’en tirer… Ah ! si Léon donnait de ses
nouvelles !…
— Reviens me voir, ma chère, tu es de si bon conseil !
Elle avait fini par conter à Berthe tout, y compris sa nuit de
noces.
— Non, pas possible !… Quel drôle d’homme !
Et c’était des papotages à perte vue, sur l’un, sur l’autre.
— Et Lérin de La Berne ?
— L’Ecrin de La Perle ? — Flambé, ma chère !… La moelle
épinière.
— Pauvre mignon !
— En voilà un qu’il faudra rayer de ta liste… Mais non, quand j’y
songe ! C’est à pouffer, ta liste !
— Eh bien ! quoi ?
— Eh bien ! ça faisait prévoir un album très gribouillé — et — pas
du tout… la première page est encore blanche !
Elles riaient comme des folles.
— Et ton mari à toi, ma petite Berthe ?
— Je ne le vois plus. Mais il devient urgent que je le revoie.
— Pourquoi ça ?
— Dame, tu ne comprends pas ?
— Non, ma foi.
— Petite sotte !
— Explique-toi.
— Relis Quitte pour la peur, après avoir relu La Chute d’un ange.
— Ah ! bah ?
— Que veux-tu ! On n’est pas parfaite.
Pendant ce temps, Paul disait à l’abbé :
— Croyez-vous qu’elle s’amende, l’abbé ? Je la plains si
profondément.
L’abbé secouait la tête.
— Je crois que tu avais raison. C’est irrémédiable. Ça me coûte à
dire… Il faudra t’en séparer.
— Eh ! l’abbé, ce serait fait si je ne la redoutais pas pour Albert. Il
l’aime toujours, l’abbé, c’est certain. Je l’ai bien vu à la manière
silencieuse dont il a accueilli l’affreux récit que je lui ai fait de la mort
de ma mère !… Il n’a pas osé me contredire, à cause de la gravité
des circonstances, mais je le connais : il est buté. Et puis, elle le
tient. Je sais ce que c’est. Il est ce que j’ai été pendant deux ans
pour elle, — jusqu’à l’épouser… On est aveugle et sourd.
— Alors ?
— Alors, je la garde, et je la garderai jusqu’à ce que j’aie contre
elle une de ces preuves palpables, matérielles, auxquelles doit se
rendre le jury le plus récalcitrant, — l’esprit le plus positif et
l’amoureux le plus ensorcelé… Cette femme, l’abbé, c’est un
malheur. Un malheur, ça se garde pour soi. Ça n’est vraiment pas un
cadeau à faire à un ami ! J’aime bien trop Albert pour ne pas essayer
jusqu’au bout de le sauver malgré lui.
III