Xingkun Liu


2020

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CRWIZ: A Framework for Crowdsourcing Real-Time Wizard-of-Oz Dialogues
Francisco Javier Chiyah Garcia | José Lopes | Xingkun Liu | Helen Hastie
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Large corpora of task-based and open-domain conversational dialogues are hugely valuable in the field of data-driven dialogue systems. Crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, have been an effective method for collecting such large amounts of data. However, difficulties arise when task-based dialogues require expert domain knowledge or rapid access to domain-relevant information, such as databases for tourism. This will become even more prevalent as dialogue systems become increasingly ambitious, expanding into tasks with high levels of complexity that require collaboration and forward planning, such as in our domain of emergency response. In this paper, we propose CRWIZ: a framework for collecting real-time Wizard of Oz dialogues through crowdsourcing for collaborative, complex tasks. This framework uses semi-guided dialogue to avoid interactions that breach procedures and processes only known to experts, while enabling the capture of a wide variety of interactions.

2019

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User Evaluation of a Multi-dimensional Statistical Dialogue System
Simon Keizer | Ondřej Dušek | Xingkun Liu | Verena Rieser
Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

We present the first complete spoken dialogue system driven by a multiimensional statistical dialogue manager. This framework has been shown to substantially reduce data needs by leveraging domain-independent dimensions, such as social obligations or feedback, which (as we show) can be transferred between domains. In this paper, we conduct a user study and show that the performance of a multi-dimensional system, which can be adapted from a source domain, is equivalent to that of a one-dimensional baseline, which can only be trained from scratch.

2018

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Explainable Autonomy: A Study of Explanation Styles for Building Clear Mental Models
Francisco Javier Chiyah Garcia | David A. Robb | Xingkun Liu | Atanas Laskov | Pedro Patron | Helen Hastie
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

As unmanned vehicles become more autonomous, it is important to maintain a high level of transparency regarding their behaviour and how they operate. This is particularly important in remote locations where they cannot be directly observed. Here, we describe a method for generating explanations in natural language of autonomous system behaviour and reasoning. Our method involves deriving an interpretable model of autonomy through having an expert ‘speak aloud’ and providing various levels of detail based on this model. Through an online evaluation study with operators, we show it is best to generate explanations with multiple possible reasons but tersely worded. This work has implications for designing interfaces for autonomy as well as for explainable AI and operator training.

2014

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The PARLANCE mobile application for interactive search in English and Mandarin
Helen Hastie | Marie-Aude Aufaure | Panos Alexopoulos | Hugues Bouchard | Catherine Breslin | Heriberto Cuayáhuitl | Nina Dethlefs | Milica Gašić | James Henderson | Oliver Lemon | Xingkun Liu | Peter Mika | Nesrine Ben Mustapha | Tim Potter | Verena Rieser | Blaise Thomson | Pirros Tsiakoulis | Yves Vanrompay | Boris Villazon-Terrazas | Majid Yazdani | Steve Young | Yanchao Yu
Proceedings of the 15th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL)

2013

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A Multithreaded Conversational Interface for Pedestrian Navigation and Question Answering
Srinivasan Janarthanam | Oliver Lemon | Xingkun Liu | Phil Bartie | William Mackaness | Tiphaine Dalmas
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference

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Demonstration of the PARLANCE system: a data-driven incremental, spoken dialogue system for interactive search
Helen Hastie | Marie-Aude Aufaure | Panos Alexopoulos | Heriberto Cuayáhuitl | Nina Dethlefs | Milica Gasic | James Henderson | Oliver Lemon | Xingkun Liu | Peter Mika | Nesrine Ben Mustapha | Verena Rieser | Blaise Thomson | Pirros Tsiakoulis | Yves Vanrompay
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference

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Evaluating a City Exploration Dialogue System with Integrated Question-Answering and Pedestrian Navigation
Srinivasan Janarthanam | Oliver Lemon | Phil Bartie | Tiphaine Dalmas | Anna Dickinson | Xingkun Liu | William Mackaness | Bonnie Webber
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2012

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A Statistical Spoken Dialogue System using Complex User Goals and Value Directed Compression
Paul A. Crook | Zhuoran Wang | Xingkun Liu | Oliver Lemon
Proceedings of the Demonstrations at the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Integrating Location, Visibility, and Question-Answering in a Spoken Dialogue System for Pedestrian City Exploration
Srinivasan Janarthanam | Oliver Lemon | Xingkun Liu | Phil Bartie | William Mackaness | Tiphaine Dalmas | Jana Goetze
Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

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A Web-based Evaluation Framework for Spatial Instruction-Giving Systems
Srinivasan Janarthanam | Oliver Lemon | Xingkun Liu
Proceedings of the ACL 2012 System Demonstrations

2011

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“The day after the day after tomorrow?” A machine learning approach to adaptive temporal expression generation: training and evaluation with real users
Srinivasan Janarthanam | Helen Hastie | Oliver Lemon | Xingkun Liu
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2011 Conference

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Adaptive Information Presentation for Spoken Dialogue Systems: Evaluation with real users
Verena Rieser | Simon Keizer | Oliver Lemon | Xingkun Liu
Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation

2010

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Optimising Information Presentation for Spoken Dialogue Systems
Verena Rieser | Oliver Lemon | Xingkun Liu
Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2009

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Automatic Generation of Information State Update Dialogue Systems that Dynamically Create Voice XML, as Demonstrated on the iPhone
Helen Hastie | Xingkun Liu | Oliver Lemon
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference

2008

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“Build Your Own” Spoken Dialogue Systems: Automatically Generating ISU Dialogue Systems from Business User Resources
Oliver Lemon | Xingkun Liu | Helen Hastie
Coling 2008: Companion volume: Demonstrations

2007

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Dialogue Policy Learning for Combinations of Noise and User Simulation: Transfer Results
Oliver Lemon | Xingkun Liu
Proceedings of the 8th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

2006

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DUDE: A Dialogue and Understanding Development Environment, Mapping Business Process Models to Information State Update Dialogue Systems
Oliver Lemon | Xingkun Liu
Demonstrations

2004

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The Queen’s Agents: Using Collaborating Object-Based Dialogue Agents in the Queen’s Communicator
Ian O’Neill | Philip Hanna | Xingkun Liu | Michael McTear
COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics