This book explores novel aspects of social robotics, spoken dialogue systems, human-robot interaction, spoken language understanding, multimodal communication, and system evaluation. It offers a variety of perspectives on and solutions to the most important questions about advanced techniques for social robots and chat systems. Chapters by leading researchers address key research and development topics in the field of spoken dialogue systems, focusing in particular on three special themes: dialogue state tracking, evaluation of human-robot dialogue in social robotics, and socio-cognitive language processing. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in both academia and industry whose work involves advanced interaction technology and who are seeking an up-to-date overview of the key topics. It also provides supplementary educational material for courses on state-of-the-art dialogue system technologies, social robotics, and related research fields.

This book explores novel aspects of social robotics, spoken dialogue systems, human-robot interaction, spoken language understanding, multimodal communication, and system evaluation. It offers a variety of perspectives on and solutions to the most important questions about advanced techniques for social robots and chat systems. Chapters by leading researchers address key research and development topics in the field of spoken dialogue systems, focusing in particular on three special themes: dialogue state tracking, evaluation of human-robot dialogue in social robotics, and socio-cognitive language processing. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in both academia and industry whose work involves advanced interaction technology and who are seeking an up-to-date overview of the key topics. It also provides supplementary educational material for courses on state-of-the-art dialogue system technologies, social robotics, and related research fields.

Linguistic annotation and text analytics are active areas of research and development, with academic conferences and industry events such as the Linguistic Annotation Workshops and the annual Text Analytics Summits. This book provides a basic introduction to both fields, and aims to show that good linguistic annotations are the essential foundation for good text analytics. After briefly reviewing the basics of XML, with practical exercises illustrating in-line and stand-off annotations, a chapter is devoted to explaining the different levels of linguistic annotations. The reader is encouraged to create example annotations using the WordFreak linguistic annotation tool. The next chapter shows how annotations can be created automatically using statistical NLP tools, and compares two sets of tools, the OpenNLP and Stanford NLP tools. The second half of the book describes different annotation formats and gives practical examples of how to interchange annotations between different formats using XSLT transformations. The two main text analytics architectures, GATE and UIMA, are then described and compared, with practical exercises showing how to configure and customize them. The final chapter is an introduction to text analytics, describing the main applications and functions including named entity recognition, coreference resolution and information extraction, with practical examples using both open source and commercial tools. Copies of the example files, scripts, and stylesheets used in the book are available from the companion website, located at the book website. Table of Contents: Working with XML / Linguistic Annotation / Using Statistical NLP Tools / Annotation Interchange / Annotation Architectures / Text Analytics