Philip R. Cohen

Also published as: Phil R. Cohen, Philip Cohen


2019

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Foundations of Collaborative Task-Oriented Dialogue: What’s in a Slot?
Philip Cohen
Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

In this paper, we examine the foundations of task-oriented dialogues, in which systems are requested to perform tasks for humans. We argue that the way this dialogue task has been framed has limited its applicability to processing simple requests with atomic “slot-fillers”. However, real task-oriented dialogues can contain more complex utterances that provide non-atomic constraints on slot values. For example, in response to the system’s question “What time do you want me to reserve the restaurant?”, a user should be able to say “the earliest time available,” which cannot be handled by classic “intent + slots” approaches that do not incorporate expressive logical form meaning representations. Furthermore, situations for which it would be desirable to build task-oriented dialogue systems, e.g., to engage in mixed-initiative, collaborative or multiparty dialogues, will require a more general approach. In order to overcome these limitations and to provide such an approach, we give a logical analysis of the “intent+slot” dialogue setting using a modal logic of intention and including a more expansive notion of “dialogue state”. Finally, we briefly discuss our program of research to build a next generation of plan-based dialogue systems that goes beyond “intent + slots”.

2018

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Active learning for deep semantic parsing
Long Duong | Hadi Afshar | Dominique Estival | Glen Pink | Philip Cohen | Mark Johnson
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Semantic parsing requires training data that is expensive and slow to collect. We apply active learning to both traditional and “overnight” data collection approaches. We show that it is possible to obtain good training hyperparameters from seed data which is only a small fraction of the full dataset. We show that uncertainty sampling based on least confidence score is competitive in traditional data collection but not applicable for overnight collection. We propose several active learning strategies for overnight data collection and show that different example selection strategies per domain perform best.

2017

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Multilingual Semantic Parsing And Code-Switching
Long Duong | Hadi Afshar | Dominique Estival | Glen Pink | Philip Cohen | Mark Johnson
Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017)

Extending semantic parsing systems to new domains and languages is a highly expensive, time-consuming process, so making effective use of existing resources is critical. In this paper, we describe a transfer learning method using crosslingual word embeddings in a sequence-to-sequence model. On the NLmaps corpus, our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 85.7% for English. Most importantly, we observed a consistent improvement for German compared with several baseline domain adaptation techniques. As a by-product of this approach, our models that are trained on a combination of English and German utterances perform reasonably well on code-switching utterances which contain a mixture of English and German, even though the training data does not contain any such. As far as we know, this is the first study of code-switching in semantic parsing. We manually constructed the set of code-switching test utterances for the NLmaps corpus and achieve 78.3% accuracy on this dataset.

2000

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The Efficiency of Multimodal Interaction for a Map-based Task
Philip Cohen | David McGee | Josh Clow
Sixth Applied Natural Language Processing Conference

1998

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Confirmation in Multimodal Systems
David R. McGee | Phil R. Cohen | Sharon Oviatt
36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Volume 2

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Confmnation in Multimodal Systems
David R. McGee | Philip R. Cohen | Sharon Oviatt
COLING 1998 Volume 2: The 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

1997

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Unification-based Multimodal Integration
Michael Johnston | Philip R. Cohen | David McGee | Sharon L. Oviatt | James A. Pittman | Ira Smith
35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 8th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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QuickSet: Multimodal Interaction for Simulation Set-up and Control
Philip R. Cohen | Michael Johnston | David McGee | Sharon Oviatt | Jay Pittman | Ira Smith | Liang Chen | Josh Clow
Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing

1993

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A Simulation-Based Research Strategy for Designing Complex NL Systems
Sharon Oviatt | Philip Cohen | Michelle Wang | Jeremy Gaston
Human Language Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop Held at Plainsboro, New Jersey, March 21-24, 1993

1990

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Performatives in a Rationally Based Speech Act Theory
Philip R. Cohen | Hector J. Levesque
28th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

1989

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The Effects of Interaction on Spoken Discourse
Sharon L. Oviatt | Philip R. Cohen
27th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

1985

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Speech Acts and Rationality
Philip R. Cohen | Hector J. Levesque
23rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

1984

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Referring as Requesting
Philip R. Cohen
10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 22nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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The Pragmatics of Referring and the Modality of Communication
Philip R. Cohen
Computational Linguistics. Formerly the American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 10, Number 2, April-June 1984

1982

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Dependencies of Discourse Structure on the Modality of Communication: Telephone vs. Teletype
Philip R. Cohen | Scott Fertig | Kathy Starr
20th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

1980

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Signalling the Interpretation of Indirect Speech Acts
Philip R. Cohen
18th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

1978

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Speech Acts as a Basis for Understanding Dialogue Coherence
C. Raymond Perrault | James F. Allen | Philip R. Cohen
American Journal of Computational Linguistics (December 1978)