Technical Workshops

ICT FML Workshop

May 7-9 2010 | Institute for Creative Technologies

Conference Website: ICT FML Workshop

Examples of FML in use

Burning Issues

  • Relationship of FML and BML: division of labour – what goes where, e.g. role of linguistic syntax
  • Agent vs System point of view: should FML/BML be for a single autonomous agent or for groups of agents working as part of a unified presentation system?
  • How to express unintentional funcion – e.g. unsuccesful deception
  • Breaking/opening up the SAIBA pipeline
  • Stefan:
    • Clearly confine what FML is mainly for (<- important to take a practical stance here)
      • spec of everything that needs to be realized by behaviors in order to achieve some higher-level goal?
      • spec of everything that might possibly causal of overt behavior (e.g. cognitive operations)?
      • context variables: part of FML?
      • goal/intention hierarchy – define where FML has to pick up from (e.g. include full-blown Gricean communicative intentions?)
      • required to make everything explicit (e.g. implicit speech acts)?
    • Structural issues (<- this is in my view one of the most important first steps we should tackle now)
      • what is the basic layout of fundamental structures: units, operations, dimensions, other parameters?
      • what dimensions are to be involved? how can they be combined (e.g. emotion and speech acts)? how can each of them be organized within sub-spaces (e.g. taxonomy of speech acts)?
      • granularity
      • compositionality and (in-)dependencies
      • preferences and conflict resolution rules
    • Possible starting points
      • pro’s and con’s of taking things like DIT++, which provide a lot of insight but were not really meant for the same thing (e.g. annotation system vs. generation specification language)
      • working towards FML bottom-up from behavior planning issues (i.e. what needs a Behavior Planner?) or top-down from content and action planning issues?
      • adopting info-state update approach for FML? do we need an underlying concept of a dialogue model in relation to which FML is to work?
  • Paul
    • How is incrementality dealt with?
    • How to balance generality and representation of domain-specific information?
    • How is contextual information dealt with?
    • Do we need to make a clear distinction between reactive and planned behaviours?
    • Do we need to take into account multilinguality and also accessibility issues?
    • How does FML fit in with language generation architectures (such as Reiter & Dale and RAGS) and language production architectures (e.g., Levelt and De Ruiter)?
    • To what extent does FML allow for representation of non-communicative behaviours.

Possible FML Elements

  • Dialogue Acts
  • Information Structure
  • Emotion
  • Dishonesty/deception
  • explicitness/importance of information (implications for whether one should be subtle or overt, implicated or explicit, complementary or redundant in expressing the function)
  • interpersonal relationship management (status, dominance/submission, closeness/distance)
  • culture-specific factors & personality differences  (is this a function itself or a method of realizing function in behavior, or some of each)
  • behavior-level function (e.g. to nod head, regardless of what this means)
  • Environmental effects (i.e. monitoring status of objects/characters, capture of attention) Conversational regulation (i.e. nonverbal backchannel feedback)

Other Issues

Paul: Rather than introduce specific elements, I have added some bullet points on issues related to specific elements/attributes. (Referencesat the bottom of the page)

  • Should we distinguish between felt and expressed emotion?
  • Should we distinguish between explicitly communicated and implicated information?
  • Should we have a representation of private and shared information?
  • For referring expression generation, some kind of representation of context may be required. Do we also include salience (see Krahmer & Theune 2002 and Piwek 2009) and importance of objects in this?
  • Do we allow for multiple dialogue act tags for a single segment?
  • Dialogue participants: Do we need to distinguish participants, side participants, bystanders and eavesdroppers.
  • Should pragmatic parameters be included. For example those of Hovy (1988) about the setting:
    • time (much, some, little)
    • tone (formal, informal, festive)
    • conditions (good, noisy)
  • Should parameters influencing politeness be included, e.g, those from Brown and Levinson (1987) which were operationalized in Walker et al. (1996):
    • Social distance
    • Power that the speaker has over the hearer
    • Do we need to represent bias, e.g., for agents that are not cooperative?