The International Computer Science Institute
is pleased to present a talk:

"Question Answering in Meeting Information Systems"

Vincenzo Pallotta ICSI & EPFL
vincenzo icsi.berkeley.edu

Monday, September 27, 2004 ICSI, Conference Room 5A 11:30 a.m.

In this talk I will outline my ongoing work on the argumentative structuring of meeting dialogues, an endeavor that is motivated by the results of recent study on the elicitation of users’ queries on meeting records: most of the queries collected concern information about the dynamics and the outcomes of meeting discussions. Meeting discussions can be structured from the perspective of decision-making by means of a well-established model of critical debates, IBIS (Issue Based Information Systems). IBIS stems from the Toulmin's theory of argumentation and accounts for the process of conflict resolution in decision-making. I will argue that IBIS structure is needed for providing relevant answers to the types of queries collected. I will also sketch an architecture for Question Answering on meeting data, which combines it its Information Retrieval component, multiple types of indexes, including argumentative structure.

Speaker Bio:

Vincenzo Pallotta is a post-doctoral Researcher and a Lecturer at the School of Information and Communication Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He made his studies in Computer Science at the University of Pisa (M.Sc.) and at EPFL (Ph.D.). He is visiting ICSI as a member of Multimodal Dialogue Management IP of the Swiss research network IM2 (Interactive Multimodal Information Management). His interests are in Computational Linguistics, Computational Logic and Cognitive Systems. More info on http://ic2.epfl.ch/~pallotta.