What is the source of a book's perceived greatness and why do certain books become part of the accepted canon? This book presents a fresh perspective on these questions: against prevalent approaches, it explains a work's reputation in terms of its aesthetic qualities or as the result of dictates by social hegemonies (the power view).

This book discusses the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) framework applied in dialogue systems. It presents POMDP as a formal framework to represent uncertainty explicitly while supporting automated policy solving. The authors propose and implement an end-to-end learning approach for dialogue POMDP model components. Starting from scratch, they present the state, the transition model, the observation model and then finally the reward model from unannotated and noisy dialogues. These altogether form a significant set of contributions that can potentially inspire substantial further work. This concise manuscript is written in a simple language, full of illustrative examples, figures, and tables.

Dialogues for Discovery: Improving Psychotherapy's Effectiveness teaches psychotherapists of all modalities how to help their clients make more frequent and higher quality discoveries in every therapy session. Detailed therapist-client dialogues in each chapter illustrate the client-centered and collaborative 4-Stage Model of Socratic Dialogue, as well as other guided discovery approaches such as behavioural experiments, imagery exercises, and role plays. Guidelines for expert use of Socratic dialogue are highlighted to help therapists avoid common therapy traps that frequently derail therapy progress, as well as effective strategies for navigating and overcoming them. Chapters are written by international experts on each topic and each includes guiding principles to help therapy stay on track, summarized in “Keep in Mind” boxes. Reader Learning Activities at the end of each chapter suggest a variety of ways to tailor the skills taught to one's own therapy / supervision practice or classroom settings, as well as Reflective Practice Worksheets which further personalize and help consolidate therapist application and development of Dialogue for Discovery skills. Although Socratic questioning is most commonly associated with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), this book offers a vision for how these processes can infuse all types of psychotherapy and lead to discoveries that transform client lives for the better.

Editor's Introduction.- Dialogue Constraints in Instruction.- Asymmetry & Accommodation in Tutorial Dialogues.- Negotiation in Collaborative Problem-Solving Dialogues.- Using Rhetorical Relations in Building a Coherent Conversational Teaching Session.- Graphics & Natural Language in Design & Instruction.- Simulator-Based Training-Support Tools for Process-Control Operators.- Designing Newton's Laws: Patterns of Social & Representational Feedback in a Learning Task.- Learning by Explaining: Fostering Collaborative Progressive Discourse in Science.- Tools for Collaborative Learning in Optics.- Deciding What to Say: An Agent-Theoretic Approach to Tutorial Dialogue.- Feedback in Computer-Assisted Instruction: Complexity & Corrective Efficiency.- Relying on a Sophisticated Student Model to Derive Dialogue Strategies in an Intelligent Tutoring System.- Dialogue Control Functions & Interaction Design.- The Role of Feedback in a Layered Model of Communication.- Communicative Action & Feedback.- >Reasons for Management in Spoken Dialogue.- Context Change & Communicative Feedback.- The Design of Interacting Agents.- Method for Dialogue Protocol Analysis.- Natural Dialogue in Modes other than Natural Language.- Coherence & Portrayal in Human-Computer Interface Design.- Feedback Issues in Consumer Appliances.- Advertisements, Proxies, & Wear: Three Methods for Feedback in Interactive Systems.- Author Index.

This book helps develop a better understanding of how researchers from different scientific backgrounds view models and uncertainty. It provides key steps in fostering and encouraging interdisciplinary research, which is vital in addressing several big issues that society faces today, such as climate change, longevity, financial and actuarial risk management. To make progress in these areas, researchers must develop an understanding of differing perspectives and methods of those working in other disciplines. This title presents the views and understandings of eminent people in their respective fields through interviews on the topic of modelling and uncertainty. Each expert was asked the same set of questions to help readers understand the similarities and differences existing between various disciplines. It also helps to bridge some of the gaps encountered by those carrying out inter- and multi-disciplinary research and suggests new approaches to modelling and uncertainty quantification.

This book discusses the simulation of conversations through a novel approach of predicting speech quality based on the interactions of two simulated interlocutors. The author describes the setup of a simulation environment that is capable of simulating human dialogue on the speech level. The impact of delay and bursty packet loss on VoIP conversations is investigated and modeled for the use in the simulation. Based on parameters extracted from simulated conversations, the author proposes extensions to the E-model, a parametric model standardized by the International Telecommunications Union, in order to predict the quality of the simulated conversations. The author shows that predictions based on the simulated conversations outperform models that rely on the transmission parameters alone.