The First International Workshop on User Modeling in Natural Language Dialogue Systems was held 30-31 August 1986 in Maria Laach, West Germany Issues addressed by the participants included the appropriate contents of a user model, techniques for constructing user models, strategies for reasoning on user models in both understanding and generating natural language dialogue, and the development of general user-modeling systems This article includes an overview of the presentations made at the workshop It is a compilation of the author's impressions and observations and is, therefore, undoubtedly incomplete; and at times might fail to accurately represent the views of the researcher presenting the work The workshop was organized by Dr. Wolfgang Wahlster and Dr. Alfred Kobsa, both of the University of Saarbriicken, and was supported by a grant from the German Science Foundation in its Special Collaborative Program on AI and Knowledge-Based Systems. Twenty-four invited researchers from seven countries participated in the workshop. The program included both long and short talks on current research ideas and projects and lively discussion among the participants; oftentimes, the participants became so engrossed in the presentations and ensuing discussions that other aspects of the program, including the banquet, had to be delayed. But all agreed the workshop had been an enjoyable experience and extremely worthwhile. The workshop program included talks on a wide spectrum of topics related to user modeling in natural language dialogue systems.

We demonstrate an integrated system for building and learning models and structures in both a real and virtual environment. The system combines natural language understanding, planning, and methods for composition of basic concepts into more complicated concepts. The user and the system interact via natural language to jointly plan and execute tasks involving building structures, with clarifications and demonstrations to teach the system along the way. We use the same architecture for building and simulating models of biology, demonstrating the general-purpose nature of the system where domain-specific knowledge is concentrated in sub-modules with the basic interaction remaining domain-independent. These capabilities are supported by our work on semantic parsing, which generates knowledge structures to be grounded in a physical representation, and composed with existing knowledge to create a dynamic plan for completing goals. Prior work on learning from natural language demonstrations enables learning of models from very few demonstrations, and features are extracted from definitions in natural language. We believe this architecture for interaction opens up a wide possibility of human-computer interaction and knowledge transfer through natural language.

The First International Workshop on User Modeling in Natural Language Dialogue Systems was held 30-31 August 1986 in Maria Laach, West Germany. Issues addressed by the participants included the appropriate contents of a user model, techniques for constructing user models in both understanding and generating natural language dialogue, and the development of general user-modeling systems. This article includes an overview of the presentations made at the workshop. It is a compilation of the author's impressions and observations and is, therefore, undoubtedly incomplete; and at times might fail to accurately represent the views of the researcher presenting the work.

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