LPCN members Michele Persiani and Maitreyee Tewari present their work at the 2nd SOCRATES workshop in Israel.
Michele’s current work focuses on affordances extraction from text. Affordances basically define the purposes or uses of objects. For example, the affordances of a ‘chair’ include sitting on it, standing on it, kicking it, moving it. Michele uses semantic role labels encoded as word embeddings as input to a variational autoencoder to learn affordances of objects.
Maitreyee’s current work focuses on how dialogue acts are organized in dialogues. Dialogue acts are labels for verbal utterances that contain pragmatic, semantic and syntactic information of the utterance. For example, the dialog act for the utterance “what’s up?” is a QUESTION, whereas for the utterance “nothing” it is ANSWER. Maitreyee uses co-operating distributed grammar systems to formalize and analyze how dialogue participants co-operate to organize the exchange of dialogue acts.