Research

The Ontology-Based Dialogue Platform (ODP) that forms the basis for the SemVox technology unites results from a number of user-oriented research and industrial projects in the research lab called “Intelligent User Interfaces” at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH).

Those research projects include projects like SmartKom, VirtualHuman and SmartWeb of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the research program Theseus of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology as well as EU projects like COMIC, TALK und i2home. Results achieved in industrial projects with partners such as T-Systems GmbH, Daimler AG, Autostadt GmbH and Volkswagen AG were also integrated into the development of the ODP-platform.

Our proximity to current developments in research and especially to the German Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) enables us to draw on current results and developments in the area of multimodal human-computer interaction when we develop our solutions and products.

In the following you will find a list of selected publications from research work done by our SemVox team:

Chapters in books

G. Zimmermann, Jan Alexandersson, C. Buiza, E. Urdaneta, U. Diaz, E. Carrasco, M. Klima, A. Pfalzgraf. Meeting the Needs of Diverse User Groups: Benefits and Costs of Pluggable User Interfaces in Designing for Older People and People with Cognitive Impairments. In: J. Soar; R. Swindell: Intelligent Technologies for the Aged - The Grey Digital Divide. Chapter . IGI Global, 2010.

Norbert Pfleger and Markus Löckelt. A Comprehensive Context Model for Multi-party Interactions with Virtual Characters. In: N. Magnenat-Thalmann et al. (eds.): New Advance in Virtual Humans: New Advances in Virtual Humans - Artificial Intelligence Environment, SCI 140, pp. 85-112, 2008.

Daniel Sonntag, Ralf Engel, Gerd Herzog, Alexander Pfalzgraf, Norbert Pfleger, Massimo Romanelli, Norbert Reithinger. Smart Web Handheld Multimodal Interaction with Ontological Knowledge Bases and Semantic Web Services. In: Thomas Huang, Anton Nijholt, Maja Pantic, Alex Plentland (eds.): Artificial Intelligence for Human Computing. Springer. Pages 272-295.

Jan Alexandersson and Norbert Pfleger. Discourse Modeling. In: W. Wahlster (ed): SmartKom - Foundations of Multimodal Dialogue Systems. Berlin/Heidelberg/New York: Springer.

Jan Alexandersson, Tilman Becker and Norbert Pfleger. Overlay. In: W. Wahlster (ed): SmartKom - Foundations of Multimodal Dialogue Systems. Berlin/Heidelberg/New York: Springer.

Ralf Engel and Norbert Pfleger. Multimodal Fusion. In: W. Wahlster (ed): SmartKom - Foundations of Multimodal Dialogue Systems. Berlin/Heidelberg/New York: Springer.

Papers at Conferences and Workshops

Markus Löckelt and Norbert Pfleger. Augmenting Virtual Characters for more Natural Interaction. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (TIDSE 2006), Darmstadt, Germany, 2006. Pages 231-240.

Norbert Reithinger, Patrick Gebhard, Markus Löckelt, Alassane Ndiaye, Norbert Pfleger, Martin Klesen. VirtualHuman - Dialogic and Emotional Interaction with Virtual Characters. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI 2006), Banff, Canada. Pages 51-58.

Norbert Pfleger, Jan Schehl. Development of Advanced Dialog Systems with PATE. Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2006 - ICSLP). Pages 1778-1781.

Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová, Tilman Becker, Nate Blaylock, Ciprian Gerstenberger, Michael Kaißer, Peter Poller, Verena Rieser and Jan Schehl. The Sammie Corpus of Multimodal Dialogues with an MP3 Player. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2006, Genoa, Italy.

Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová, Ciprian Gerstenberger, Verena Rieser and Jan Schehl. The Sammie Multimodal Dialogue Corpus Meets the Nite XML Toolkit. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference of Multi-dimensional Markup in Natural Language Processing, NLPXML 2006, Trento, Italy.

Tilman Becker, Peter Poller, Jan Schehl, Nate Blaylock, Ciprian Gerstenberger, and Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová. The SAMMIE system: Multimodal in-car dialogue. Proceedings of COLING/ACL 2006, Sydney, Australia, July 15-21 2006. Interactive presentation.

Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová, Nate Blaylock, Ciprian Gerstenberger, Verena Rieser, Tilman Becker, Michael Kaißer, Peter Poller, and Jan Schehl. An experiment setup for collecting data for adaptive output planning in a multimodal dialogue system. In: Graham Wilcock, Kristiina Jokinen, Chris Mellish, and Ehud Reiter (eds.): Proceedings of the 10th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG-05), pages 191-196, Aberdeen, Scotland, August 8-10 2005.

Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová, Nate Blaylock, Ciprian Gerstenberger, Verena Rieser, Tilman Becker, Michael Kaißer, Peter Poller, and Jan Schehl. Presentation strategies for flexible multimodal interaction with a music player. In: Claire Gardent and Bertrand Gaiffe (eds.): Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (DIALOR 2005), pages 155-158, Nancy, France, June 9-11 2005.

Norbert Pfleger. Context Based Multimodal Fusion. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI 2004), State College, PA.

Technical papers / white papers

Alexander Pfalzgraf, Norbert Pfleger, Jan Schehl and Jochen Steigner. ODP – Ontology-based Dialogue Platform. Technical Report, SemVox GmbH 2008.

Tilman Becker, Nate Blaylock, Ciprian Gerstenberger, Andreas Korthauer, Nadine Perera, Michael Pitz, Peter Poller, Jan Schehl, Frank Steffens, Rosmary Stegmann and Jochen Steigner (ed.). In-Car Showcase Based on TALK Libraries. Deliverable 5.3, TALK Project, 2007.

Jan Schehl (ed), Stina Ericsson, Ciprian Gerstenberger and Pilar Manchón. Plan library for multimodal turn planning. Deliverable 3.2, TALK Project, 2007.

Jana Besser, Robert Neßelrath, Alexander Pfalzgraf, Jan Schehl, Jochen Steigner and Norbert Pfleger (ed.). Selection of Technical Components and System Specification. Deliverable 6.1, I2Home Project, 2007.

Web 3.0: Convergence of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web - Wolfgang Wahlster and Andreas Dengel, with contributions by Dietmar Dengler, Dominik Heckmann, Malte Kiesel, Alexander Pfalzgraf, Thomas Roth-Berghofer, Leo Sauermann, Eric Schwarzkopf, and Michael Sintek, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Technology Radar Feature Paper, Edition II/2006 June 2006, pp. 1-23.

David Milward, Gabriel Amores, Tilman Becker, Nate Blaylock, Malte Gabsdil, Staffan Larsson, Oliver Lemon, Pilar Manchón, Guillermo Pérez, and Jan Schehl. Integration of ontological knowledge with the ISU approach. Deliverable 2.1, TALK Project, September 2005.