Analysis of speech acts and discourse structures is essential to a dialogue understanding system because speech acts and discourse structures are closely tied with the speaker's intention. However, it has been difficult to infer a speech act and a discourse structure from a surface utterance because they highly depend on the context of the utterance. We propose a statistical dialogue analysis model to determine discourse structures as well as speech acts using a maximum entropy model. The model can automatically acquire probabilistic discourse knowledge from an annotated dialogue corpus. Moreover, the model can analyze speech acts and discourse structures in one framework. In the experiment, the model showed better performance than other previous works.

To implement a fast and reliable question-answering system in Korean, we propose a two-pass answer indexer using co-occurrence information between answer candidates and adjacent content words. The two-pass indexer scans documents twice for obtaining local scores and global scores. Then, the two-pass indexer calculates the degrees of association between answer candidates and co-occurring content words. Using this technique, the proposed QA system shortens the response time and enhances the precision.

Most of commercial websites provide customers with menu-driven navigation and keyword search. However, these inconvenient interfaces increase the number of mouse clicks and decrease customers' interest in surfing the websites. To resolve the problem, we propose an information retrieval assistant using a natural language interface in online sales domains. The information retrieval assistant has a client-server structure; a system connector and a NLP (natural language processing) server. The NLP server performs a linguistic analysis of users' queries with the help of coordinated NLP agents that are based on shallow NLP techniques. After receiving the results of the linguistic analysis from the NLP server, the system connector interacts with outer information provision systems such as conventional information retrieval systems and relational database management systems according to the analysis results. Owing to the client-server structure, we can easily add other information provision systems to the information retrieval assistant with trivial modifications of the NLP server. In addition, the information retrieval assistant guarantees fast responses because it uses shallow NLP techniques. In the preliminary experiment, as compared to the menu-driven system, we found that the information retrieval assistant could reduce the bothersome tasks such as menu selecting and mouse clicking because it provides a convenient natural language interface.