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Mihai Rotaru |
UPDATE: As of October 2008, I have moved to Textkernel where I am working as a senior natural language engineer. I successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation on September 11, 2008. More details (thesis, new contact information) will be posted soon.
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Computer Science Department at University of Pittsburgh. My advisor is Diane J. Litman.
My research interests lie in the area of Spoken Dialogue Systems. I primarily focus on the challenges and opportunities that arise from building spoken dialogue systems in complex domains like the tutoring domain. For my work, I use the ITSPOKE speech-based computer tutor.
For my thesis, I am looking at Applications of Discourse Structure for Spoken Dialogue Systems in complex domains (e.g. tutoring). Dialogues (human-human or human-computer) have an inherent structure called the discourse structure. However, due to the relatively simple structure of dialogues in previous spoken dialogue systems, discourse structure has seen limited applications in these systems. In contrast, dialogues in complex domains like tutoring exhibit a richer discourse structure which enables new applications of this concept.
I am pursuing two types of applications of discourse structure:
· System side applications - my work investigates if the discourse structure information is useful for various spoken dialogue system tasks: performance analysis, characterization of user affect and characterization of speech recognition problems. |
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· User side applications - my work investigates whether the discourse structure information is useful for users through a graphical representation of the discourse structure (the Navigation Map). |
Other research problems I am or have been working on include Interactions between Dialogue Phenomena and Emotion Prediction. A list of older research projects or class-related projects is available here.
I am actively involved in the ITSPOKE group, the NLP@Pitt group and the Dialogs on Dialogs group. I was an organizer for the 2nd Young Researchers' Round Table on Spoken Dialogue Systems workshop.
