Natural Language Dialogue group

The AXL project focuses on accelerating leadership development. AXL provides an engaging and memorable way to transfer tacit knowledge and develop critical thinking through case-method teaching, filmed storytelling and interactive training. The primary products of the project are an easily modifiable website AXLnet and custom fictional filmed cases created in collaboration with Hollywood talent to address specific leadership issues. This project is a collaboration with the U.S. Army's Leader Development Research Unit.

The Natural Language Dialogue group's work focused on the interactive interviews with the characters from the story.

Free text questions and pre-recorded video as a response is a recurrent theme in NL interfaces. It has proved very useful in various applications for training and entertainment as well. Users are allowed to input a free-text question which in turn elicits a pre-recorded video response. Although the video response tends to have very good value in terms of immersive experience, the very design of the system allows for a lack of coherence. It is due to the cases when there are no video responses directly answering the question or are not phrased in a desired manner. We tried to address this issue by introducing short linking dialog between question and answer to bridge the gap. Experiments were carried out to assess whether such linking dialogs can increase the coherence of interaction. It proved that interactions with human-generated linking dialogs have significantly better coherence. (Gandhe et. al., 2004) Further analysis of human-generated linking dialogs reveals that these carry more information than present in the answer or the question. This leads us to realize the need for a knowledge base behind such a system. We have built such a knowledge base and have implemented first techniques for creating simple computer generated linking dialogs. (Gandhe et. al., 2006)