Alexandre Denis

PostDoc on CCCP-Prosodie ANR project
TALARIS (Langue et Dialogue) - LORIA - Nancy - France
denis [at] loria [dot] fr Alexandre Denis

Interests

dialogue systems, in particular the grounding process
multimodal interpretation, semantic and reference resolution
semantic and reference evaluation
reference generation

PhD (in french)

Robustness in practical dialogue systems : grounding process modeling and evaluation for misunderstanding management

Dialogue systems in natural language are error-prone. We advocate the resolution of these errors within the collaborative model of Clark and Schaefer (1989) : each participant is willing to reach the mutual understanding by providing evidence he understands his partner's utterances. This raises the problem of recursive acceptance as noted by Traum (1994,1999) but existing models that solve this problem either make important simplifications or are too complex to implement. We propose to consider shared beliefs of understanding in order to guide the grounding process. We implemented the model and made an evaluation of its accuracy within the simulation paradigm. We evaluated wether two systems are able to ground an utterance. This setup allows fine-grained analysis of a wide range of grounding problems. Eventually, the evaluation results show the efficiency of grounding while measuring the gain of understanding.

Alexandre Denis. Robustesse dans les systèmes de dialogue finalisé : modélisation et évaluation du processus d'ancrage pour la gestion de l'incompréhension. PhD thesis, Université Henri Poincaré - Nancy I, 10 2008. version finale. [ bib | http | .pdf ]

Projects

I've been involved in the following projects in the TALARIS team (previously Langue et Dialogue) at LORIA, Nancy, France :

CCCP-Prosodie (ANR) : Wikipedia user profiling based on NLP analysis (deep syntax, connotation semantics)
ALLEGRO (Interreg) : language teaching dialogue system in SecondLife
GIVE challenge : participation in an evaluation of instruction generation systems in situated interaction
PORT-MEDIA (ANR) : deep semantic annotation
MMIL : MultiModal Interface Language
Grounding (PhD) : dialogue structure modeling based on evidence of understanding
AMIGO (IST) : 2D gesture OSGI service in a pervasive ambient intelligence framework
MEDIA (Technolangue) : evaluation of dialogue systems understanding abilities in the french MEDIA campaign
M.Sc : reference domains theory implementation in description logics
OZONE (IST) : multimodal dialogue system in an ambient intelligent framework

Publications

[1]	Carlos Areces, Guillaume Hoffmann, and Alexandre Denis. Modal Logics with Counting. In Logic, Language, Information and Computation, 17th International Workshop, WoLLIC 2010, Brasilia, Brazil, July 6-9, 2010, Proceedings WoLLIC 2010, 17th Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Computation, Brasilia Brésil, 2010. [ bib \| http \| .pdf ]
[2]	Alexandre Denis, Lina Maria Rojas Barahona, and Matthieu Quignard. Extending MMIL Semantic Representation: Experiments in Dialogue Systems and Semantic Annotation of Corpora. In Fifth Joint ISO-ACL/SIGSEM Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation isa-5 Fifth Joint ISO-ACL/SIGSEM Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation isa-5, page ??, Hong-Kong Chine, 2010. [ bib \| http \| .pdf ]
[3]	Alexandre Denis. Generating Referring Expressions with Reference Domain Theory. In Proceedings of International Natural Language Generation Conference INLG 2010, pages 27-35, Dublin Irlande, july 2010. [ bib \| http \| .pdf ]
[4]	Alexandre Denis. Reference reversibility with Reference Domain Theory. In Proceedings of the 11th annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue the 11th annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, page ??, Tokyo Japon, september 2010. [ bib \| http \| .pdf ]
[5]	Dominique Fréard, Alexandre Denis, Françoise Détienne, Michael Baker, Matthieu Quignard, and Flore Barcellini. The role of argumentation in online epistemic communities: the anatomy of a conflict in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics, pages 91-98, Delft Pays-Bas, august 2010. [ bib \| http \| .pdf ]
[6]	Alexandre Denis and Matthieu Quignard. Exploitation du terrain commun pour la production d'expressions référentielles dans les systèmes de dialogue. In Conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles - TALN'09, Senlis France, 2009. [ bib \| http \| .pdf ]
[7]	Hélène Bonneau Maynard, Matthieu Quignard, and Alexandre Denis. MEDIA: a semantically annotated corpus of task oriented dialogs in French. Language Resources and Evaluation, 43(4):329-354, 2009. [ bib \| DOI \| http ]
[8]	Alexandre Denis and Matthieu Quignard. Modélisation du principe d'ancrage pour la robustesse des systèmes de dialogue homme-machine finalisés. In Actes de la Conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles - TALN 2008 Conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles - TALN 2008, pages 89-98, Avignon France, 2008. [ bib \| http \| .pdf ]
[9]	Hélène Bonneau Maynard, Alexandre Denis, Frédéric Béchet, Laurence Devillers, Fabrice Lefèvre, Matthieu Quignard, Sophie Rosset, and Jeanne Villaneau. Media : évaluation de la compréhension dans les systèmes de dialogue. In Stéphane Chaudiron et Khalid Choukri, editor, L'évaluation des technologies de traitement de la langue, les campagnes Technolangue, Cognition et traitement de l'information, page 209. Hermès, Lavoisier, 2008. Technolangue, Ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche. [ bib \| http ]
[10]	Alexandre Denis. Robustesse dans les systèmes de dialogue finalisé : modélisation et évaluation du processus d'ancrage pour la gestion de l'incompréhension. PhD thesis, Université Henri Poincaré - Nancy I, 10 2008. version finale. [ bib \| http \| .pdf ]
[11]	Alexandre Denis, Frédéric Béchet, and Matthieu Quignard. Résolution de la référence dans des dialogues homme-machine : évaluation sur corpus de deux approches symbolique et probabiliste. In Actes de la 14e conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles - TALN 2007, pages 261-270, Toulouse France, 2007. [ bib \| http \| .pdf ]
[12]	Alexandre Denis, Guillaume Pitel, Matthieu Quignard, and Patrick Blackburn. Incorporating Asymmetric and Asynchronous Evidence of Understanding in a Grounding Model. In Ron Artstein and Laure Vieu, editors, 11th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - DECALOG 2007, Trento Italie, 2007. [ bib \| http \| .pdf ]
[13]	Alexandre Denis, Matthieu Quignard, and Guillaume Pitel. A Deep-Parsing Approach to Natural Language Understanding in Dialogue System: Results of a Corpus-Based Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 5th international Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) Proceedings of Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 339-344, Genoa Italie, 2006. [ bib \| http \| .pdf ]
[14]	Alexandre Denis, Guillaume Pitel, and Matthieu Quignard. Resolution of Referents Groupings in Practical Dialogues. In 7th SIGDial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue - SIGdial'06, Sydney Australie, 2006. [ bib \| http \| .pdf ]
[15]	Alexandre Denis, Guillaume Pitel, and Matthieu Quignard. A model of grouping for plural and ordinal references. In 18th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information - ESSLLI 2006, Malaga Espagne, 2006. [ bib \| http \| .pdf ]
[16]	Frédéric Landragin, Alexandre Denis, Annalisa Ricci, and Laurent Romary. Multimodal Meaning Representation for Generic Dialogue Systems Architectures. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation - LREC 2004, pages 521-524. ELDA, 2004. [ bib \| http \| .pdf ]

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