User models have recently attracted much research interest in the field of artificial intelligence dialog systems. It has become evident that flexible user-oriented dialog behavior of such systems can be achieved only if the system has access to a model of the user containing assumptions about his/her background knowledge as well as his/her goals and plans in consulting the system. Research in the field of user models investigates how such assumptions can be automatically created, represented and exploited by the system in the course of an "on-line" interaction with the user. The communication medium in this interaction need not necessarily be a natural language, such as English or German. Formal interaction languages are also permit ted. The emphasis is placed on systems with natural language input and output, however. A dozen major and several more minor user modeling systems have been de signed and implemented in the last decade, mostly in the context of natural-language dialog systems. The goal of UM86, the first international workshop on user model ing, was to bring together the researchers working on these projects so that results could be discussed and analyzed, and hopefully general insights be found, that could prove useful for future research. The meeting took place in Maria Laach, a small village some 40 miles south of Bonn, West Germany. 25 prominent researchers were invited to participate.

Spoken dialog systems have the potential to offer highly intuitive user interfaces, as they allow systems to be controlled using natural language. However, the complexity inherent in natural language dialogs means that careful testing of the system must be carried out from the very beginning of the design process. This book examines how user models can be used to support such early evaluations in two ways: by running simulations of dialogs, and by estimating the quality judgments of users. First, a design environment supporting the creation of dialog flows, the simulation of dialogs, and the analysis of the simulated data is proposed. How the quality of user simulations may be quantified with respect to their suitability for both formative and summative evaluation is then discussed. The remainder of the book is dedicated to the problem of predicting quality judgments of users based on interaction data. New modeling approaches are presented, which process the dialogs as sequences, and which allow knowledge about the judgment behavior of users to be incorporated into predictions. All proposed methods are validated with example evaluation studies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems, IWDS 2010, held in Gotemba, Japan, in October 2010. The 22 session papers presented together with 2 invited keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers deal with topics around Spoken Dialogue Systems for Ambient Environment and discuss common issues of theories, applications, evaluation, limitations, general tools and techniques.

As spoken natural language dialog systems technology continues to make great strides, numerous issues regarding dialog processing still need to be resolved. This book presents an exciting new dialog processing architecture that allows for a number of behaviors required for effective human-machine interactions, including: problem-solving to help the user carry out a task, coherent subdialog movement during the problem-solving process, user model usage, expectation usage for contextual interpretation and error correction, and variable initiative behavior for interacting with users of differing expertise. The book also details how different dialog problems in processing can be handled simultaneously, and provides instructions and in-depth result from pertinent experiments. Researchers and professionals in natural language systems will find this important new book an invaluable addition to their libraries.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization, held in Trento, Italy, on June 22-26, 2009. This annual conference was merged from the biennial conference series User Modeling, UM, and the conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems, AH. The 53 papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. The tutorials and workshops were organized in topical sections on constraint-based tutoring systems; new paradigms for adaptive interaction; adaption and personalization for Web 2.0; lifelong user modelling; personalization in mobile and pervasive computing; ubiquitous user modeling; user-centred design and evaluation of adaptive systems.

The refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on User Modeling, UM 2003, held in Johnstown, PA, USA in June 2003. The 20 revised full papers and 28 revised poster papers presented together with 12 abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 106 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on adaptive hypermedia, adaptive Web, natural language and dialogue, plan recognition, evaluation, emerging issues of user modeling, group modeling and cooperation, applications, student modeling, learning environments - natural language and paedagogy, and mobile and ubiquitous computing.

The ten volumes of "Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights" focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While other volumes select philosophical, grammatical, social, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this third volume focuses on the interface between language and cognition. Language use is impossible without the mobilization of a large variety of cognitive processes, each serving a different purpose. During the last half century cognitive approaches to language have been particularly successful, and the broad spectrum of contributions to this volume testify to this success. As cognitive approaches to language are by definition a subset of the larger enterprise of cognitive science, a contribution on this general topic sets the stage. This is joined by a chapter on cognitive grammar, a theoretical study of the architecture of human language that is deeply inspired by general cognitive principles. A chapter on experimentation offers a crash-course on basic issues of experimental design and on the rationale behind statistical testing in general and the most important statistical tests in particular, offering a methodological toolkit for understanding many of the other contributions. Different chapters cover a broad range of topics: language acquisition, psycholinguistics, specialized topics within the latter field (e.g. the bilingual mental lexicon, categorization), and aspects of language awareness. Some chapters home in on what have become indispensible perspectives on the cognitive underpinnings of language: the way language is represented and processed in the human brain and simulation studies. The ever-growing success of the latter type of studies is exemplified, for instance, by the highly flourishing connectionist tradition and the more general paradigm of artificial intelligence, each of which is dealt with in a separate contribution.