Institute of Communications Engineering

M. Sc. Juliana Miehle

Research

PhD Thesis

Embedded Aigaion Query

My research interest lies in rendering Spoken Dialogue Systems more user-adaptive as the conversation agent may appear more familiar and trustworthy when adapting the system's behaviour to the user. People adapt their interaction styles to one another when they communicate. My aim is to design a Spoken Dialogue System which adapts to the user's communication idiosyncrasies. Therefore, the decision process of the Dialogue Manager (DM) should not only rely on the domain information, but also take into account the user state and traits. Moreover, the DM should not only be responsible for what is said next, but also for how it is said. This is what makes the difference to generic DM where the two main tasks are to track the dialogue state and to select the next system action, i.e., what is uttered by the system. In order to do so, three steps have to be performed: first, the differences in communication styles in human-computer interaction have to be investigated, thereby looking at different dialogue scenarios and taking into account various user states. Afterwards, models have to be created representing the preferences in communication styles for different user traits and states. In the third step, these models can then be applied to the Dialogue Management in order to decide on the system's communication style in every dialogue turn, depending on the user's current situation, their background and their current state. To accomplish the second and the third part, I plan to deploy Statistical Dialogue Modelling and Machine Learning in order to utilize a methodology which is able to deal with uncertainties.

Research Interests

  • Adaptive Dialogue Management
  • Communication Styles in Human-Computer Interaction
  • User Modelling
  • Statistical Dialogue Modelling
  • Machine Learning
  • Reward Modelling

Projects

KRISTINA: A Knowledge-Based Information Agent with Social Competence and Human Interaction Capabilities (HORIZON2020-LEIT-ICT 22 - 2014)

MUNGO: Multi-user indoor navigation using natural spoken dialog and self-learning ntologies (Google Faculty Research Award - 2018)

Master Thesis

IQ-adaptive Statistical Dialogue Management using Gaussian Processes

Embedded Aigaion Query2022

J. Miehle, W. Minker and S. Ultes
When to Say What and How: Adapting the Elaborateness and Indirectness of Spoken Dialogue Systems
Dialogue & Discourse, Vol. 13(1), pp. 1--40, April 2022
DOI
Bibtex

J. Miehle, W. Minker and S. Ultes
When to Say What and How: Adapting the Elaborateness and Indirectness of Spoken Dialogue Systems
Dialogue and Discourse, Vol. 13, Num. 1, pp. 1-40, 2022
Bibtex

2021

S. Kawanaka, J. Miehle, Y. Matsuda, H. Suwa, K. Yasumoto and W. Minker
Task allocation interface design and personalization in gamified participatory sensing for tourism
arXiv:2105.12032, May 2021
Link to Document
Bibtex

J. Miehle, S. Wieluch, W. Minker and S. Ultes
Decide or Delegate: How Script Knowledge Based Conversational Assistants Should Act in Inconclusive Situations
Adjunct Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking (ICDCN 2021), Association for Computing Machinery, Nara, Japan, pp. 69--73, January 2021
DOI
Bibtex

J. Miehle, I. Feustel, W. Minker and S. Ultes
A Script Knowledge Based Dialogue System for Indoor Navigation
Conversational Dialogue Systems for the Next Decade, Springer Singapore, Series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, Vol. 704, pp. 379--385, 2021
DOI
Bibtex

Z. Callejas, B. Lugrin, J. Martin, M. McTear and J. Miehle
Adaptive Systems for Multicultural and Ageing Societies
Multimodal Agents for Ageing and Multicultural Societies: Communications of NII Shonan Meetings, Springer Singapore, Singapore, pp. 1--20, 2021
DOI
Bibtex

J. Miehle, N. Wagner, W. Minker and S. Ultes
Culture-Aware Dialogue Management for Conversational Assistants
Conversational Dialogue Systems for the Next Decade, Springer Singapore, Series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, Vol. 704, pp. 103--115, 2021
DOI
Bibtex

Z. Zhang, J. Miehle, Y. Matsuda, M. Fujimoto, Y. Arakawa, K. Yasumoto and W. Minker
Exploring the Impacts of Elaborateness and Indirectness in a Behavior Change Support System
IEEE Access, Vol. 9, pp. 74778-74788, 2021
DOI
Bibtex

J. Miehle, W. Minker, E. André and K. Yoshino (Eds.)
Multimodal Agents for Ageing and Multicultural Societies: Communications of NII Shonan Meetings
Springer Singapore, Singapore, 2021
DOI
Bibtex

2020

S. Kawanaka, J. Miehle, Y. Matsuda, H. Suwa, K. Yasumoto and W. Minker
Design and Evaluation on Task Allocation Interfaces in Gamified Participatory Sensing for Tourism
MobiQuitous 2020 - 17th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, pp. 458--463, December 2020
DOI
Bibtex

J. Miehle, I. Feustel, J. Hornauer, W. Minker and S. Ultes
Estimating User Communication Styles for Spoken Dialogue Systems
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Marseille, France, pp. 533--541, May 2020
Link to Document
Bibtex

2019

J. Miehle, L. Pragst, W. Minker and S. Ultes
Enabling Dialogue Management with Dynamically Created Dialogue Actions
arXiv:1907.00684, July 2019
Link to Document
Bibtex

J. Miehle, I. Bagci, W. Minker and S. Ultes
A Social Companion and Conversational Partner for the Elderly
Advanced Social Interaction with Agents, Springer International Publishing, Series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, Vol. 510, pp. 103--109, 2019
DOI
Bibtex

S. Ultes, J. Miehle and W. Minker
On the Applicability of a User Satisfaction-Based Reward for Dialogue Policy Learning
Advanced Social Interaction with Agents, Springer International Publishing, Series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, Vol. 510, pp. 211--217, 2019
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2018

J. Miehle, W. Minker and S. Ultes
Exploring the Impact of Elaborateness and Indirectness on User Satisfaction in a Spoken Dialogue System
Adjunct Publication of the 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP), ACM, Singapore, pp. 165--172, July 2018
Link to Document
Bibtex

J. Miehle, N. Gerstenlauer, D. Ostler, H. Feußner, W. Minker and S. Ultes
Expert Evaluation of a Spoken Dialogue System in a Clinical Operating Room
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Miyazaki, Japan, May 2018
Link to Document
Bibtex

J. Miehle, W. Minker and S. Ultes
What Causes the Differences in Communication Styles? A Multicultural Study on Directness and Elaborateness
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Miyazaki, Japan, May 2018
Link to Document
Bibtex

2017

J. Miehle, N. Gerstenlauer, D. Ostler, H. Feußner, W. Minker and S. Ultes
An Intelligent Digital Assistant for Clinical Operating Rooms
Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SEMDIAL), Saarbrücken, Germany, pp. 164--165, August 2017
Link to Document
Bibtex

L. Pragst, J. Miehle, W. Minker and S. Ultes
Challenges for adaptive dialogue management in the KRISTINA project
ISIAA 2017: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI International Workshop on Investigating Social Interactions with Artificial Agents, ACM, New York, NY, USA, Glasgow, UK, pp. 11-14, 2017
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Bibtex

J. Miehle, D. Ostler, N. Gerstenlauer and W. Minker
The next step: intelligent digital assistance for clinical operating rooms
Innovative Surgical Sciences, Vol. 2, Num. 3, pp. 159--161, 2017
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2016

L. Pragst, J. Miehle, S. Ultes and W. Minker
Automatic Modification of Communication Style in Dialogue Management
Proceedings of the INLG 2016 Workshop on Computational Creativity in Natural Language Generation, Association for Computational Linguistics, Edinburgh, UK, pp. 36--40, September 2016
Link to Document
Bibtex

J. Miehle, K. Yoshino, L. Pragst, S. Ultes, S. Nakamura and W. Minker
Cultural Communication Idiosyncrasies in Human-Computer Interaction
Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), Association for Computational Linguistics, Los Angeles, USA, pp. 74--79, September 2016
Link to Document
Bibtex

Embedded Aigaion Query2018

L. Wanner, M. Farrús, S. Mille, S. Dasiopoulou, M. Domínguez, O. Martinez, F. Sukno, J. Blat, G. Llorach, H. Plass, S. Vrochidis, G. Meditskos, E. Kamateri, I. Kompatsiaris, E. André, F. Lingenfelser, D. Schiller, A. Stam, L. Stellingwerff, B. Vieru, G. Eschweiler, J. Mohr, M. Brachthäuser, L. Pragst, W. Minker, J. Miehle, C. Baudracco, T. Sánchez and B. Schäfer
D1.5 - Public Final Activity Report
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), March 2018
Bibtex

2016

G. Mehlmann, D. Schiller, F. Lingenfelser, E. André, E. Kamateri, G. Meditskos, S. Dasiopoulou, F. Sukno, L. Pragst, J. Miehle, W. Minker and A. Mulder
D2.3 - Fusing Vocal, Facial and Gestural Communication Modalities
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), April 2016
Bibtex

Embedded Aigaion Query2018

W. Minker and J. Miehle
Adaptive Spoken Dialogue Systems Research at Ulm University
Presentation at National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tokyo (Japan), November 2018

W. Minker and J. Miehle
International Research Activities on Spoken Dialogue Technology at Ulm University
Presentation at Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Nara (Japan), November 2018

W. Minker and J. Miehle
Motivation zur Auslandsmobilität von Studierenden in MINT-Fächern
Presentation at the seminar "Hinaus in die Welt! Steigerung der Auslandsmobilität deutscher MINT-Studierender", Internationale DAAD-Akademie, Bonn (Germany), April 2018

Ich betreue gerne Bachelor und Master Arbeiten aus dem Bereich meines Promotionsthemas. Schreibe mir einfach eine E-Mail, wenn du Interesse hast.

I am pleased to supervise Bachelor and Master Theses within my PhD Topic. Just write an email if you are interested.

In Progress / Completed

Embedded Aigaion Query2019

Master Thesis
Adaptive Dialogue Management for a Script Knowledge Based Conversational Assistant
2019
Link to Document
DOI

2017

Bachelor Thesis
Controlling an Intelligent Operating Room with Spoken Language
2017
Link to Document
DOI

Bachelor Thesis
Integrating the NAO robot into the OwlSpeak framework
2017
Link to Document

Master Thesis
User-adaptive Statistical Dialogue Management using OpenDial
2017
Link to Document
DOI

2016

Bachelor Thesis
Konzeption und Modellierung eines Dialogs für die Nutzergruppe „Ältere“
2016
Link to Document

Teaching Assistance

  • Dialogue Systems, WS 2016/2017
  • Dialogue Systems, WS 2017/2018
  • Dialogue Systems, WS 2018/2019
  • Dialogue Systems, WS 2019/2020

Projects and Seminars

  • Seminar Dialogue Systems, SS 2016
  • Seminar Research Trends in Dialogue Systems, SS 2016
  • Proseminar Dialogue Systems, SS 2016
  • Dialogue Systems Project, WS 2016/2017
  • Seminar Dialogue Systems, WS 2016/2017
  • Seminar Research Trends in Dialogue Systems, WS 2016/2017
  • Proseminar Dialogue Systems, WS 2016/2017
  • Dialogue Systems Project, SS 2017
  • Seminar Dialogue Systems, SS 2017
  • Seminar Research Trends in Dialogue Systems, SS 2017
  • Proseminar Dialogue Systems, SS 2017
  • Dialogue Systems Project, WS 2017/2018
  • Seminar Research Trends in Dialogue Systems, WS 2017/2018
  • Dialogue Systems Project, SS 2018
  • Dialogue Systems Project, WS 2018/2019
  • Dialogue Systems Project, SS 2019

Conferences

  • Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) 2020
  • Meeting of Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2020
  • Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2020

Research Assistant