Adaptive Language Interaction

Talk by Prof. Dr. Vera Demberg (Saarland University, Saarland Informatics Campus, Computer Science and Computational Linguistics)

Location: APB 1004
Start: 3. May 2018 at 11:00 am
End: 3. May 2018 at 12:30 pm
iCal

This talk is part of Dresden Talks on Interaction & Visualization:

<https://imld.de/research/dresden-talks/2018-demberg/>

Language-based interaction with digital agents (e.g. Siri, Alexa) has become ubiquitous, and is used in various situations and by an increasingly large variety of different users. Research shows however that a dialog system should not just be able to understand and generate language correctly, but that it should also adapt the way it formulates its messages to fit the user and the situation (for instance, it should use simpler formulations to avoid distraction during driving).

In this talk, I will start out by presenting an information-theoretic measure, surprisal, as a way of quantifying linguistically induced cognitive load on a word-by-word basis. I will then proceed to talk about neural network models that we have recently developed to estimate semantic surprisal, i.e. the amount of cognitive load that will be caused by an unexpected word like "bathtub" in context, such as "I did the dishes in the bathtub.".

Finally, I will report on our recent work using a novel pupillometry-based measure of cognitive load, the Index of Cognitive Activity (ICA), which allows us to assess cognitive load in dual task settings such as driving a car.

More info at: https://imld.de/research/dresden-talks/2018-demberg/