LING 575 - Spoken Dialog Systems
Spring 2017
Specialized Topics
Each student will be responsible for selecting a topic to present and lead class discussion on. The topic may be chosen from the list of topics below or
you may propose another that you are interested in. This will involve
presenting the main ideas from 2-3 papers and synthesizing the challenges in
the area and the approaches taken to them.
Please identify one specialized topic that you wish to present and post to the corresponding GoPost thread.
NOTE: You may work in pairs or individually on the presentation.
- At least 3 papers will be identified for each topic. Presenters should read 2 papers, and are also encouraged to find
other related materials. The ACL anthology is an excellent resource, as is the SIGDial web site.
To-Dos
- Participants
- Read at minimum one paper for three of the planned topics in advance of class. Reading
other articles is, of course, encouraged.
- For each week, please choose one paper as the focus of
a critical reading assignment.
For the critical reading assignment, you should write a (roughly) one page
response to the paper and identify questions for class discussion. You might find it useful to read Mitzenmacher and Ramsey's guidelines on reading research papers (thanks to Jan Wiebe and Rebecca Hwa for the pointer).
- Your write-up should include:
- A brief summary of the main point of the paper.
- Notes about the interest of the paper from an NLP perspective
- At least one observation about: its relation to related work, strengths
or weaknesses, ways it could be improved, ways it could be extended, or
how it could be used to improve another application.
- You shoud post to the corresponding GoPost conversation:
- One or more questions or issues for class discussion.
- The assignment should be submitted by 11:45p.m. Tuesdays, but submitting earlier will allow me and the presenters to review the comments prior to class.
- Presenters
- Presenters should plan to present for 10 minutes, with an additional 10
minutes for discussion.
- The members of the class will also have read some of the papers, so you do not
need to detail all the content in the paper(s). Instead, you should present
a synthesis and analysis of the topic, abstracting away from the gory details:
- What problems are being addressed? Why are they interesting/challenging?
- What are the goals and main claims of the paper(s)?
- What sorts of data/approaches/evaluation are employed?
- What are the main things you've learned about the topic?
- Provide a *constructive* critique.
Your goal is also to stimulate and lead discussion of the topic.
- How feasible are these ideas to implement in a dialog system?
- What would be the effect of implementing these sorts of techniques in
dialog systems?
- Are the approaches more motivated by modeling human conversational
behavior or engineering considerations?
- Presentation material (slides) may be in PowerPoint,
PDF, Google Docs, etc. It would be appreciated if the slides were provided
prior to the start of class.
- Online presenters should make sure to have a microphone available. It is
recommended that online presenters enter the meeting room a few minutes before
class to allow for checking of audio levels. An approach that has worked well in previous years is to prerecord the main presentation, and then come online
in real-time for the discussion period.