Spoken dialog tasks incur many errors including speech recognition errors, understanding errors, and even dialog management errors. These errors create a big gap between the user's intention and the system's understanding, which eventually results in a misinterpretation. To fill in the gap, people in human-to-human dialogs try to clarify the major causes of the misunderstanding to selectively correct them. This paper presents a method of clarification techniques to human-to-machine spoken dialog systems. We viewed the clarification dialog as a two-step problem-Belief confirmation and Clarification strategy establishment. To confirm the belief, we organized the clarification process into three systematic phases. In the belief confirmation phase, we consider the overall dialog system's processes including speech recognition, language understanding and semantic slot and value pairs for clarification dialog management. A clarification expert is developed for establishing clarification dialog strategy. In addition, we proposed a new design of plugging clarification dialog module in a given expert based dialog system. The experiment results demonstrate that the error verifiers effectively catch the word and utterance-level semantic errors and the clarification experts actually increase the dialog success rate and the dialog efficiency.

We propose a new query expansion method in the extended Boolean model that improves precision without degrading recall. For improving precision, our method promotes the ranks of documents having more query terms since users typically prefer such documents. The proposed method consists of the following three steps: (1) expanding the query by adding new terms related to each term of the query, (2) further expanding the query by adding augmented terms, which are conjunctions of the terms, (3) assigning a weight on each term so that augmented terms have higher weights than the other terms. We conduct extensive experiments to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves precision by up to 102% for the TREC-6 data compared with the existing query expansion method using a thesaurus proposed by Kwon et al.

There is general agreement that the problem of data semantics has to be addressed for XML data to become machine-processable. This problem can be tackled by defining a semantic mapping between an XML schema and an ontology. Unfortunately, creating such mappings is a tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone task. To alleviate this problem, we present a solution that heuristically discovers semantic mappings between XML schemas and ontologies. The solution takes as input an initial set of simple correspondences between element attributes in an XML schema and class attributes in an ontology, and then generates a set of mapping formulas. Once such a mapping is created, it is important and necessary to maintain the consistency of the mapping when the associated XML schema and ontology evolve. In this paper, we first offer a mapping formalism to represent semantic mappings. Second, we present our heuristic mapping discovery algorithm. Third, we show through an empirical study that considerable effort can be saved when discovering complex mappings by using our prototype tool. Finally, we propose a mapping maintenance plan dealing with schema evolution. Our study provides a set of effective solutions for building sustainable semantic integration systems for XML data.

A scheduling policy or a schedulability test is defined to be sustainable if any task system determined to be schedulable remains so if it behaves "better" than mandated by its system specifications. We provide a formal definition of sustainability, and subject the concept to systematic analysis in the context of the uniprocessor scheduling of periodic and sporadic task systems. We argue that it is, in general, preferable engineering practice to use sustainable tests if possible, and classify common uniprocessor schedulability tests according to whether they are sustainable or not.

Terrain reconstruction from images is an ill-posed, yet commonly desired Structure from Motion task when compositing visual effects into live-action photography. These surfaces are required for choreography of a scene, casting physically accurate shadows of CG elements, and occlusions. We present a novel framework for generating the geometry of landscapes from extremely noisy point cloud datasets obtained via limited resolution techniques, particularly optical flow based vision algorithms applied to live-action video plates. Our contribution is a new statistical approach to remove erroneous tracks ('outliers') by employing a unique combination of well established techniques-including Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) for robust parameter estimation and Radial Basis Functions (REFs) for scattered data interpolation-to exploit the natural constraints of this problem. Our algorithm offsets the tremendously laborious task of modeling these landscapes by hand, automatically generating a visually consistent, camera position dependent, thin-shell surface mesh within seconds for a typical tracking shot.