John
Dowding
University
University of California/Santa Cruz
NASA Ames Research Center
Mail Stop
T27A-2
Phone: (650) 604-0493
NASA
I am a member of the RIALIST
group at NASA's Ames Research Center, conducting research in
language and speech technologies. During 2001, I was a Visiting Lecturer
in the Linguistics Department
at Stanford University. I maintain a strong collaborative
relationship with Stanley Peters
and the Computational Semantics
Laboratory at CSLI. When I am at Stanford (most
Wednesdays), I can usually be found in Cordura
Hall, room 210.
Research Interests
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Language Modeling |
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Parsing and Formal Language Theory |
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Logic Programming and Prolog |
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Dialogue Modeling and Spoken Dialogue Systems |
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Prosody and Spontaneous Speech Effects |
Projects
Clarissa is
a spoken dialogue system to assist astronauts while executing procedures on the
International Space Station
(ISS). Clarissa leads the astronaut through the execution of a procedure by
reading procedure steps out loud, and allowing the astronaut to navigate
through the procedure entirely by voice.
Clarissa is scheduled
to lift off on Progress
16 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on
Mobile
Agents is a project to study how teams of humans, robots, and other mobile
hardware and software agents can cooperate while performing scientific
tasks. The Mobile Agents project
conducts annual field tests in remote harsh environments to test hardware and
software technologies (speech recognition and understanding, robotics, wireless
networking, modeling and simulation software, bio-medical sensors, etc.) to
simulate combined astronaut and robot Extra-Vehicular Activities (EVA) on the
surface of the Moon or Mars. My
contribution to this project is in the Mobile Agents RIALIST System, a spoken
dialogue system that lets the astronaut-subjects interact with all of their
hardware and software systems by voice.
The Mobile Agents project is led by Bill
Clancey out of NASA’s
Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) is a DARPA project led by my colleagues in the AI Center at SRI International. CALO is an absolutely huge project bringing together researchers in artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation, human-computer interaction, flexible planning, and behavioral studies from over 20 US Universities and companies. My small part in this involves working with Stanley Peters and the Computational Semantics Laboratory at CSLI to study information extraction from human-human meetings. The issues we are researching include segmenting meetings by topic, topic classification, and determining what decision have been reached and what action items have assigned.
Courses Taught
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Fall 2001 - 139P Prolog for Linguists |
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Winter 2001 - Parsing and Generation of Natural Languages |
Academic
Background
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Graduate Study in Computer Science, University of Pennsylvania, 1984-1990. |
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BS, Computer Science and Philosophy, Syracuse University, 1984. |
Professional
Background
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Senior Scientist, RIACS, 2000 - 2004 |
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GO Translator Product Manager, GO.com, 2000. |
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Senior Computer Scientist, Recourse Technologies, 1999-2000. |
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Senior Computer Scientist, SRI International, Artificial Intelligence Center, 1990-1999. |
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Research Scientist, Unisys Corporation, Logic-based Systems Group, 1984-1990. |
Publications
Mobile Agents
Spoken Dialogue Systems in
MDRS Rotation 29, J. Dowding and
The Mobile Agents
Integrated Field Test:
Mobile Agents: A Distributed Voice-Commanded
Sensory and Robotic System for Surface EVA Assistance, W. Clancey, M. Sierhuis,
R. Alena, S. Crawford, J. Dowding, J. Graham, C. Kaskiris, K. Tyree, and R. van Hoof, In. R.B. Malla
and A. Maji (eds)
Engineering, Construction, and Operations in Challenging Environments: Earth
and Space 2004, Houston, ASCE. pp. 85-92.
Spoken Dialogue Systems in Space Suits, J. Dowding, S. Early, J. Hieronymus, and
A Spoken Dialogue
Interface to a Geologist’s Field Assistant, J. Dowding and J. Hieronymus, Human
Language Technology/North American Chapter of the Association for Computational
Linguistics 2003,
Clarissa
Talking through
procedures: An Intelligent Space Station Procedure Assistant, G. Aist,
J. Dowding, B.A. Hockey, M. Rayner, J. Hieronymus, D.
Bohus, B. Boven, N.
Blaylock, E. Campana, S. Early, G. Gorrell, and S. Phan, in
Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the European Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), Demo Session, Budapest,
Hungary, 2003.
A Demonstration of a
Spoken Dialogue Interface to an Intelligent Procedure Assistant for Astronaut
Training and Support,
G. Aist, J. Dowding, B.A. Hockey, and J. Hieronymus,
in Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics, Demo Session; Philadelphia, PA, July 2002.
Targeted Help
Targeted Help for Spoken
Dialogue Systems: Intelligent Feedback Improves Naïve User’s Performance, B.A. Hockey, O. Lemon,
E. Campana, L. Hiatt, G. Aist,
J. Hieronymus, A. Gruenstein, and J. Dowding,
Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the European Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), Budapest, Hungary, April
2003.
Generating Canonical
Example Sentences using Candidate Words, J. Dowding, G. Aist,
B.A. Hockey, and E. O. Bratt, Natural Language Generation
in Spoken and Written Dialogue, AAAI Spring Symposium 2003, Stanford, CA, March
24-26, 2003.
Targeted Help and
Dialogue about Plans,
B.A. Hockey, J. Dowding, G. Aist, J. Hieronymus,
Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics, Demo Session, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 2002.
Targeted Help: Embedded
Training and Methods for Evaluation, B.A. Hockey, G. Aist,
J. Hieronymus, O. Lemon, and J. Dowding, Intelligent Tutoring Systems,
Empirical Methods Workshop, June, 2002.
CommandTalk
Syntactic and Semantic
Input to Prosodic Markup in CommandTalk, E.O. Bratt and J. Dowding, Natural Language Generation in Spoken
and Written Dialogue, AAAI Spring Symposium 2003, Stanford, CA, March 24-26,
2003.
Building a Robust Dialogue System with Limited Data, S. Goldwater, E. Bratt, J. Gawron, and J. Dowding, Workshop on Conversational Systems at the 1st Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Seattle, WA, 2000.(postscript, pdf)
The CommandTalk Spoken Dialogue System, A. Stent, J. Dowding, M. Gawron, E. Bratt, and R. Moore, in the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, College Park, MA, 1999(postscript, pdf)
Interpreting Language in Context in CommandTalk,
J. Dowding,
How Natural Inputs Aid Interaction in Graphical Simulations?, by L. Julia, A. Cheyer, J. Dowding, H. Bratt, J. Gawron, E. Bratt, and R. Moore, VSMM `98, Gifu, Japan, 1998.
CommandTalk: A Spoken-Language Interface
for Battlefield Simulations, R. Moore, J. Dowding, H. Bratt,
J. Gawron, Y. Gorfu, and A.
Cheyer, in the Proceedings of the 5th
Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing,
Unification Grammars
An Open Source
Environment for Compiling Typed Unification Grammars into Speech Recognisers, M. Rayner, B.A.
Hockey, and J. Dowding, in Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the
European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) Demo
Session, Budapest, Hungary, 2003.
Grammar Specialization
Meets Language Modelling, M Rayner,
B.A. Hockey and J. Dowding, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken
Language Processing (ICSLP),
LEO:
An Architecture for Sharing Resources for
Unification-Based Grammars, J. Baldridge,
J. Dowding, and S. Early. LREC 2002,
A Practical Issues in Compiling Typed Unification Grammars for Speech Recognition, J. Dowding, B.A. Hockey, J.M. Gawron, and C. Culy, in the Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Toulouse, France, 2001. (postscript, pdf)
A Baseline Method for Compiling Typed Unification Grammars into Context Free Language Models, M. Rayner, J. Dowding, B.A. Hockey, in the Proceedings of EUROSPEECH 2001, Aalborg, Denmark.(postscript, pdf)
Do CFG Language Models Need Agreement Constraints?, M. Rayner, G. Gorell, B.A. Hockey, J. Dowding, and J. Boye, in the Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Pittsburgh, PA, 2001.(postscript, pdf)
Dialogue Systems and Planning
A Spoken Dialogue Interface to the EUROPA
Planner, J. Dowding, J. Frank, B.A. Hockey,
A. Jonsson, G. Aist, and J.
Hieronymus, 3rd International NASA Workshop on Planning and
Scheduling for Space, Houston, TX, October 27-29, 2002.
A Dialogue Model for
Interaction with Planners, Schedulers, and Executives, N. Blaylock, J. Dowding,
and J. Allen, 3rd International NASA Workshop on Planning and Scheduling
for Space, Houston, TX, October 27-29, 2002.
Demonstration of a Spoken Dialogue Interface for
Planning Activities of a Semi-autonomous Robot, J. Dowding, J. Frank, B.A. Hockey, A. Jonsson,
and G. Aist, Human Language Technology 2002.
Demonstration of a Spoken Dialogue Interface to a Semi-autonomous
Robot, J. Dowding, B.A. Hockey, J. Hieronymus,and M. Rayner. In the Proceedings of the North American Association for
Computational Linguistics, 2nd annual meeting,
ATIS
HTTP://WWW.SPEECH.SRI.COM/DEMOS/ATS.HTML, L. Julia,
A. Cheyer, J. Dowding, and M. Charafeddine,
at AAAI `97,
Combining Linguistic and Statistical Knowledge Sources in Natural Language Processing for ATIS, by R. Moore, D. Appelt, J. Dowding, J. Gawron, and D. Moran, in the Proceedings of the ARPA Spoken Language Systems Technology Workshop, Austin, TX, 1995.(postscript, pdf)
The SRI Telephone ATIS System, H. Bratt, J.
Dowding, and K. Hunicke-Smith, in the Proceedings of
the ARPA Spoken Language Systems Technology Workshop,
SRI’s Recent Progress on the ATIS Task, R. Moore, M. Cohen, V. Abrash, D. Appelt, H. Bratt, L. Cherny, J. Dowding, H.
Franco, J. Gawron, and D. Moran, in the Proceedings
of the ARPA Spoken Language Systems Technology Workshop,
Gemini
Interleaving Syntax and Semantics in an Efficient Bottom-Up Parser,
J. Dowding, R. Moore, F. Andry, and D. Moran, in the
Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics,
Gemini: A Natural Language System for Spoken Language Understanding, J. Dowding, J. Gawron, D. Appelt, L. Cherny, R. Moore, and D. Moran, in the Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Columbus, OH, 1993.(postscript, pdf)
Integrating Multiple Knowledge Sources for the Detection and Correction of Repairs in Human-Computer Dialog, J. Bear, J. Dowding, and E. Shriberg, in the Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Newark, DE, 1992.(postscript, pdf)
Automatic Detection and Correction of Repairs in Human-Computer Dialog, E. Shriberg, J. Bear, and J. Dowding, in the Proceedings of the DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop, 1992.
Efficient Bottom-Up Parsing, R. Moore and J. Dowding, in Proceedings of the DARPA Speech and Language Workshop, 1991.(postscript, pdf)
Pundit/Restriction Grammar
Restriction Grammar: a Logic Grammar, L. Hirschman and J. Dowding, in Logic and Logic Grammars for Language Processing, ed. S. Szpakowiz and P. Saint-Dizier, Ellis Horword Publishers, 1990.
Reducing Search by Partitioning the Word Network, J. Dowding, in Proceedings of the Speech and Natural Language Workshop, 1989.
The PUNDIT Natural Language Processing System, L. Hirschman, M. Palmer, J. Dowding, D. Dahl, M. Linebarger, R. Passonneau, in AI Systems in Government Conference, Computer Society of the IEEE, March, 1989.
A Dynamic Translator for Rule Pruning in Restriction Grammar, J. Dowding and L. Hirschman, in Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming II, Ed. by V. Dahl and P. Saint-Dizier, North-Holland Publishers, 1988.
Recovering Implicit Information, M. Palmer, L. Hirschman, D. Dahl, M. Linebarger, and J. Dowding, in Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, New York, NY, 1986.
Eye Movements and Dialogue
Using Eye Movements to Determine Referents in a Spoken Dialogue
System, E. Campana,
J. Baldridge, J. Dowding, B.A. Hockey, R. Remington
and L. Stone, L. PUI, November 2001,