Mary Ellen Foster - Publications

The local downloads of these files (labelled Pdf) should be considered unofficial versions. In most cases, I've also provided a link to the official, final, published version of a paper, either via DOI, a link to the ACL Anthology, or in some cases a link to the paper on the original conference website. Please let me know if a link is broken or otherwise inaccessible.

Journal articles

Mary Ellen Foster and Jon Oberlander. Corpus-based generation of head and eyebrow motion for an embodied conversational agent. Language Resources and Evaluation, Vol. 41, Numbers 3--4, pages 305--323, December 2007. doi:10.1007/s10579-007-9055-3. [ Bib | Pdf (unofficial preprint) ]

Conference papers

Mary Ellen Foster, Manuel Giuliani, and Alois Knoll. Comparing Objective and Subjective Measures of Usability in a Human-Robot Dialogue System. In Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2009), Singapore, August 2009. acl:P09-1099 [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster, Manuel Giuliani, Amy Isard, Colin Matheson, Jon Oberlander, and Alois Knoll. Evaluating Description and Reference Strategies in a Cooperative Human-Robot Dialogue System. In Proceedings of the Twenty-first International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09), Pasadena, California, July 2009. http://ijcai.org/papers09/Papers/IJCAI09-302.pdf [ Bib | Pdf ]

Ellen Gurman Bard, Robin Hill, and Mary Ellen Foster. What Tunes Accessibility of Referring Expressions in Task-Related Dialogue? In Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2008), Washington, DC, July 2008. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Automated metrics that agree with human judgements on generated output for an embodied conversational agent. In Proceedings of the 5th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2008), Salt Fork, Ohio, June 2008. acl:W08-1113 [ Bib | Pdf ]

Pujan Ziaie, Thomas Müller, Mary Ellen Foster, and Alois Knoll. Using a Naive Bayes Classifier based on K-Nearest Neighbors with Distance Weighting for Static Hand-Gesture Recognition in a Human-Robot Dialog System. In Proceedings of the 13th International CSI Computer Conference (CSICC 2008), Kish Island, Iran, March 2008. (Note: a revised version of this paper was published as a book chapter in 2009.) [ Bib ]

Mary Ellen Foster, Ellen Gurman Bard, Robin L. Hill, Markus Guhe, Jon Oberlander. and Alois Knoll. The Roles of Haptic-Ostensive Referring Expressions in Cooperative, Task-based Human-Robot Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2008), Amsterdam, March 2008. doi:10.1145/1349822.1349861. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Generating Embodied Descriptions Tailored to User Preferences. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA07), Paris, September 2007. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-74997-4_24. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Enhancing human-computer interaction with embodied conversational agents. In Proceedings of HCI International 2007, Beijing, July 2007. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-73281-5_91 [ Bib | Pdf ]

Markus Rickert, Mary Ellen Foster, Manuel Giuliani, Tomas By, Giorgio Panin, and Alois Knoll. Integrating language, vision and action for human robot dialog systems. In Proceedings of HCI International 2007, Beijing, July 2007. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-73281-5_108 [ Bib ]

Mary Ellen Foster, Tomas By, Markus Rickert, and Alois Knoll. Human-robot dialogue for joint construction tasks. In ICMI '06: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Multimodal interfaces, pages 68-71, Banff, Alberta, November 2006. doi:10.1145/1180995.1181009. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster and Jon Oberlander. Data-driven generation of emphatic facial displays. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2006), pages 353-360, Trento, Italy, April 2006. (Note: this paper is obsoleted by the Foster and Oberlander (2007) journal article) acl:E06-1045 [ Bib | Pdf ]

Michael White, Mary Ellen Foster, Jon Oberlander, and Ash Brown. Using facial feedback to enhance turn-taking in a multimodal dialogue system. In Proceedings of HCI International 2005, Las Vegas, July 2005. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Corpus-based planning of deictic gestures in COMIC. In Proceedings of the INLG 2004 Student Session, Brockenhurst, England, July 2004. [ Web | Bib | Pdf ]

Johanna Moore, Mary Ellen Foster, Oliver Lemon, and Michael White. Generating tailored, comparative descriptions in spoken dialogue. In Proceedings of the 17th International FLAIRS Conference (FLAIRS 2004), Miami Beach, May 2004. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Evaluating models of graph comprehension. In Proceedings of EuroCogSci 2003, Osnabrück, Germany, September 2003. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Peer-reviewed workshop and demo papers

Ellen Gurman Bard, Robin Hill, Manabu Arai, and Mary Ellen Foster. Accessibility and Attention in Situated Dialogue: Roles and Regulations. In Proceedings of the CogSci 2009 Workshop on Production of Referring Expressions (PRE-Cogsci 2009), Amsterdam, July 2009. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster, Manuel Giuliani, Thomas Müller, Markus Rickert, Alois Knoll, Wolfram Erlhagen, Estela Bicho, Nzoji Hipólito, and Luís Louro. Combining Goal Inference and Natural-Language Dialogue for Human-Robot Joint Action. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Combinations of Intelligent Methods and Applications (CIMA 2008) at ECAI 2008, Patras, Greece, July 2008. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Ellen Gurman Bard, Robin Hill, and Mary Ellen Foster. Who Tunes Accessibility of Referring Expressions in Task-Related Dialogue? In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (Londial 2008), London, June 2008. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster and Colin Matheson. Following assembly plans in cooperative, task-based human-robot dialogue. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (Londial 2008), London, June 2008. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Roles of a Talking Head in a Cooperative Human-Robot Dialogue System. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA07) (Poster session), Paris, September 2007. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-74997-4_46 [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Associating facial displays with syntactic constituents for generation. In Proceedings of the ACL 2007 Linguistic Annotation Workshop (The LAW), Prague, June 2007. acl:W07-1504. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Comparing rule-based and data-driven selection of facial displays. In Proceedings of the ACL 2007 Workshop on Embodied Language Processing, Prague, June 2007. acl:W07-1901 [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster and Michael White. Avoiding repetition in generated text. In Proceedings of the 11th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG 2007), Schloss Dagstuhl, June 2007. acl:W07-2305 [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Issues for corpus-based multimodal generation. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Multimodal Output Generation (MOG 2007), Aberdeen, Scotland, January 2007. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster, Tomas By, Markus Rickert, and Alois Knoll. Symmetrical joint action in human-robot dialogue. In Proceedings of the RSS 2006 Workshop on Intuitive Human-Robot Interaction for getting The Job Done, Philadelphia, August 2006. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Dialogue management for cooperative, symmetrical human-robot interaction. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (Brandial 2006) (Poster session), Potsdam, September 2006. [ Web | Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster and Michael White. Assessing the impact of adaptive generation in the COMIC multimodal dialogue system. In Proceedings of the IJCAI 2005 Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems, Edinburgh, Scotland, August 2005. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Interleaved planning and output in the COMIC fission module. In Proceedings of the ACL 2005 Workshop on Software, Ann Arbor, June 2005. [ Web | Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster, Michael White, Andrea Setzer, and Roberta Catizone. Multimodal generation in the COMIC dialogue system. In Proceedings of the ACL 2005 Demo Session, Ann Arbor, June 2005. acl:P05-3012 [ Poster | Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster and Michael White. Techniques for text planning with XSLT. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on NLP and XML (NLPXML 2004), Barcelona, July 2004. acl:W04-0601 [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Generating output in the COMIC multimodal dialogue system. In Proceedings of the W3C Workshop on Multimodal Interaction, Sophia Antipolis, France, July 2004. [ Web | Bib | Pdf ]

Chrysanne DiMarco and Mary Ellen Foster. The automated generation of web documents that are tailored to the individual reader. In Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Natural Language Processing on the World Wide Web, Stanford University, March 1997. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Theses

Mary Ellen Foster. Evaluating the impact of variation in automatically generated embodied object descriptions. PhD thesis, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, August 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/2440. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Automatically generating text to accompany information graphics. Master's thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, September 1999. Also published as technical report CSRI-397. [ Bib | Pdf ]

Other publications

Katerina Avramides, Sara Bernardini, Jingying Chen, Christopher Frauenberger, Mary Ellen Foster, Oliver Lemon, and Kaska Porayska-Pomsta. ECHOES: Technology-Enhanced Learning for Exploring and Improving Social Interaction Skills. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cognitive Systems (CogSys 2010) (Poster session), Zürich, January 2010. [ Bib | Poster ]

Pujan Ziaie, Thomas Müller, Mary Ellen Foster, and Alois Knoll. A Naive Bayes Classifier with Distance Weighting for Hand-Gesture Recognition. In Advances in Computer Science and Engineering, volume 6 of Communications in Computer and Information Sciences, pages 308-315, 2009. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-89985-3_38 [ Bib ]

Mary Ellen Foster, Markus Rickert, and Michael Braun. The JAST collaborative human-robot dialogue system. Proceedings of CogSys II (Poster session), Nijmegen, April 2006. [ Bib | Poster ]

Chrysanne DiMarco and Mary Ellen Foster. A method and apparatus for authoring of customizable multimedia documents. International Patent Application PCT/CA98/00771 filed 11 August 1998, 1998. [ Web | Bib ]

Talks

Mary Ellen Foster. Generating and Evaluating the Behaviour of Embodied Conversational Agents. Guest lecture in Advanced Interaction Design course, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, 15 March 2010. [ Slides ]

Alois Knoll and Mary Ellen Foster. Joint-Action Science and Technology: Results from an Extensive Project on Human-Robot Interaction. Guest lecture in the ShanghAI Lectures series. 10 December 2009. [ Video ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Human-Robot Joint Action in the JAST Project. Talk presented in the Visage Talk Series, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. November 2009. [ Slides ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Evaluating embodied conversational agents. Talk presented at the Centre for Language Technology, Macquarie University, Sydney, September 2008. [ Slides ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Cooperatively following plans in human-robot dialogue. Talk presented at the IEEE RO-MAN 2008 workshop "Towards Natural Human-Robot Joint Action", Munich, August 2008. [ Slides ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Cooperative, Task-Based Human-Robot Dialogue in JAST. Talk presented at the Interdisciplinary Tea, University of Edinburgh, July 2008. [ Slides ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Evaluating the Output of an Embodied Multimodal Dialogue System. Guest lecture in Dialogue and Natural Language Generation course, University of Edinburgh, January 2008. [ Slides ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Representing and using assembly plans in cooperative, task-based human-robot dialogue. Talk presented at a Planning/Language Interest Group meeting, University of Edinburgh, November 2007. [ Slides ]

Mary Ellen Foster and Amy Isard. Dialogues with robots: overview of the JAST and INDIGO projects. Talk presented at a Dialogue Systems Group meeting, University of Edinburgh, June 2007.

Mary Ellen Foster. Communication Frameworks for Multimodal Dialogue Systems. Talk presented at a Dialogue Systems Group meeting, University of Edinburgh, January 2007. [ Slides ]

Mary Ellen Foster. Cooperative, symmetrical human-robot dialogue in JAST. Talk presented at a Dialogue Systems Group meeting, University of Edinburgh, June 2006.

Mary Ellen Foster. The iCat in the JAST multimodal dialogue system. Talk presented at the First iCat Workshop, Eindhoven, March 2006. [ Bib | Slides ]