Discourse Modeling

SummaryWe provide a discription of the robust and generic discourse module that is the central repository of contextual information in SmartKom. We tackle discourse modeling by using a three-tiered discourse structure enriched by partitions together with a local and global focus structure. For the manipulation of the discourse structures we use unification and a default unification operation enriched with a metric mirroring the similarity of competing structures called Overlay. We show how a wide variety of naturally occuring multimodal phenomena, in particular, short utterances including elliptical and referring expressions, can be processed in a generic and robust way. As all other modules of the SmartKom backbone, DiM relies on the a domain ontology for the representation of user intentions. Finally, we show that our approach is robust against phenomena caused by imperfect recognition and analysis of user actions.