Next Department 4 seminar will take place on Thursday, 27th October at 3 pm in room A008.

Date: Thursday, 27th October 2022 at 15:00
Place: LORIA, room A008
Speaker: Mario Giulianelli, University of Amsterdam

Title: An information-theoretic framework for grounded dialogue modelling

Abstract: What are the decision making processes by which humans choose
words to achieve goals in their environment? Can we replicate them in a
computer system? These are the core questions of grounded dialogue
modelling, the study of interactive language use in context. We will
start by looking at a few examples of grounded, goal-oriented dialogues.
Then we will present a formal framework that incorporates fundamental
notions of linguistic interaction — such as goals, costs, utility, and
context — into an information theoretic model of communication. Using
visually grounded referential dialogues as a case study, we will show
how these notions can be modelled with state-of-the-art computational
techniques, and how they explain human strategies of language production
in terms of communicative efficiency and effectiveness. We will conclude
by discussing the impact of our framework on language technologies,
focusing in particular on the evaluation and development of natural
language generation systems.