Theory and Practice in Discourse and Dialogue for Interactive Systems

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Assignment 3: Project Proposal
Due Oct 20

(Possibly Group Projects)

(Note: Feedback will be given the following week, after which you will have 2 weeks to build the system.)

Describe Domain and Application. Choosing a good domain is crucial for dialogue systems research. The domain should serve both to provide an interesting foundation for developing a research application and to constrain the task for which your application is designed. Here are some examples:

  • A voice navigator for web pages.
  • An interactive reading tutor.
  • A personalized newscaster
  • A system to assess student's argument structure
  • An air travel help system

You are free to select any of these or you may present your own alternative. You can use the data that you collected and transcribed as inspiration.

Motivation. Explain why this project is of interest. Place it into the context of the research discussed in class (or from recommended & outside readings). All projects should address at least one of the discourse phenomena discussed in class. So, don't just tell us how users will benefit from the application; also tell us how you will learn about discourse phenomena from building the application.

Potential Problems. Discuss potential problems that might arise in development and usability of your system. Present initial ideas for how to evaluate the success of the system.

A Note on Scope. Keep the scope of the project in mind: you will only have two weeks to build the system and we only expect you to use the CSLU toolkit to develop it (although other technologies are allowed, see Assignment 4). Just like in the real world, you need to think about the limitations imposed by time and the available technologies. These should constrain your proposal accordingly. Therefore, we don't expect you to build a sophisticated system. We do expect you to demonstrate your understanding of some of the theoretical and design concepts discussed.

(Hint: Read chapters 18 & 19 of Jurafsky & Martin!)

Hand in: 2 page write-up (no more than 3pages)