M. Sc. Louisa Pragst

Research

PhD Thesis

Embedded Aigaion Query

The goal of my research is to integrate culture and emotion in dialogue management. I approach this subject from two angles: the training of a dialogue strategy and the creation of available system actions.


The first aspect is concerned with the challenges of adapting the dialogue strategy to culture, user emotion and system emotion simultaneously. The high amount of parameters that the dialogue strategy is adapted to results in new challenges for the training of the dialogue strategy. I investigate the performance of various machine learning approaches for adaptation to several parameters. Additionally, as the different input parameters might result in different preferences regarding the selected dialogue strategy, special consideration is given to relative importance of each input parameter. To further enhance the dialogue management, the influence the selected system action will have on the system emotion is taken into account by the dialogue strategy.
The second aspect covers the creation of dialogue contributions that are suitable choices for specific cultures or emotions. By providing a variety of system actions to choose from, the possibilities for behaviour of the dialogue manager can be expanded and it is more likely to find an adequate dialogue contribution. I investigate domain-independent variations of system actions, such as the level of verbosity or directness, and how they can be generated automatically.

Research Interests

  • Multimodal Dialogue System Management
  • Statistical Dialogue Modeling
  • Machine Learning
  • Emotion in Dialogue Management
  • Culture in Dialogue Management
  • Automatic Adaptation of Sematic Content of System Actions

Embedded Aigaion Query 2020

L. Pragst, W. Minker and S. Ultes
Comparative Study of Sentence Embeddings for Contextual Paraphrasing
Proceedings of The 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France, pp. 6843-6853, May 2020
Link to Document
Bibtex

A. Benitez-Guijarro, R. Bond, F. Booth, Z. Callejas, E. Ennis, A. Esposito, M. Kraus, G. McConvey, M. McTear, M. Mulvenna, C. Potts, L. Pragst, R. Turkington, N. Wagner and H. Zheng
Co-creating requirements and assessing end-user acceptability of a voice-based chatbot to support mental health: A thematic analysis of a living lab workshop
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog System Technology, Madrid, Spain, 2020
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

L. Pragst, W. Minker and S. Ultes
Exploring the Applicability of Elaborateness and Indirectness in Dialogue Management
Advanced Social Interaction with Agents : 8th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems, Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 189--198, 2019
Link to Document
DOI
Bibtex

2018

N. Rach, K. Weber, L. Pragst, E. André, W. Minker and S. Ultes
EVA: A Multimodal Argumentative Dialogue System
Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Boulder, Colorado, October 2018
Bibtex

L. Pragst and S. Ultes
Changing the Level of Directness in Dialogue using Dialogue Vector Models and Recurrent Neural Networks
Proceedings of the 19th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), Association for Computational Linguistics, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 11-19, July 2018
Bibtex

L. Pragst, N. Rach, W. Minker and S. Ultes
On the Vector Representation of Utterances in Dialogue Context
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Paris, France, Miyazaki, Japan, May 2018
Bibtex

2017

L. Wanner, E. André, J. Blat, S. Dasiopoulou, M. Farrús, T. Fraga, E. Kamateri, F. Lingenfelser, G. Llorach, O. Martinez, G. Meditskos, S. Mille, W. Minker, L. Pragst, D. Schiller, A. Stam, L. Stellingwerff, F. Sukno, B. Vieru and S. Vrochidis
Design of knowledge-based agent as a social companion
Proceedings of the International Conference on Health and Social Care Information Systems and Technologies (HCist), Barcelona, Catalonia, November 2017
Bibtex

L. Wanner, E. André, J. Blat, S. Dasiopoulou, M. Farrús, T. Fraga, E. Kamateri, F. Lingenfelser, G. Llorach, O. Martinez, G. Meditskos, S. Mille, W. Minker, L. Pragst, D. Schiller, A. Stam, L. Stellingwerff, F. Sukno, B. Vieru and S. Vrochidis
KRISTINA: A Knowledge-Based Virtual Conversation Agent
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (PAAMS'17), Porto, Portugal, June 2017
Bibtex

L. Pragst, K. Yoshino, W. Minker, S. Nakamura and S. Ultes
Acquisition and Assessment of Semantic Content for the Generation of Elaborateness and Indirectness in Spoken Dialogue Systems
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), Vol. 1, pp. 915-925, 2017
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
DOI
Bibtex

L. Pragst, S. Ultes and W. Minker
Recurrent Neural Network Interaction Quality Estimation
Dialogues with Social Robots: Enablements, Analyses, and Evaluation, Springer Singapore, Singapore, pp. 381--393, 2017
Link to Document
DOI
Bibtex

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

F. Sukno, M. Domínguez, A. Ruiz, D. Schiller, F. Lingenfelser, L. Pragst, E. Kamateri and S. Vrochidis
A Multimodal Annotation Schema for Non-Verbal Affective Analysis in the Health-Care Domain
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Multimedia Analysis and Retrieval for Multimodal Interaction, pp. 9--14, 2016
Bibtex

L. Wanner, J. Blat, S. Dasiopoulou, M. Domínguez, G. Llorach, S. Mille, F. Sukno, E. Kamateri, I. Kompatsiaris, S. Vrochidis, E. André, F. Lingenfels, G. Mehlmann, A. Stam, L. Stellingwerff, L. Lamel, B. Vieru, W. Minker, L. Pragst and S. Ultes
Towards a Multimedia Knowledge-Based Agent with Social Competence and Human Interaction Capabilities
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Multimedia Analysis and Retrieval for Multimodal Interaction, pp. 21--26, 2016
Link to Document
Bibtex

G. Meditskos, S. Dasiopoulou, L. Pragst, S. Ultes, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris and L. Wanner
Towards an Ontology-Driven Adaptive Dialogue Framework
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Multimedia Analysis and Retrieval for Multimodal Interaction, pp. 15--20, 2016
Link to Document
Bibtex

2015

L. Pragst, S. Ultes, M. Kraus and W. Minker
Adaptive Dialogue Management in the KRISTINA Project for Multicultural Health Care Applications
Proceedings of the 19thWorkshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SEMDIAL), Gothenburg, Sweden, pp. 202--203, August 2015
Link to Document
Bibtex

2014
L. Pragst, F. Richter, P. Bercher, B. Schattenberg and S. Biundo
Introducing Hierarchy to Non-Hierarchical Planning Models - A Case Study for Behavioral Adversary Models
28th PuK Workshop "Planen, Scheduling und Konfigurieren, Entwerfen" (PuK 2014), Stuttgart, Germany, September 2014

Embedded Aigaion Query 2018

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

A. Stam, L. Stellingwerff, L. De Cunha, H. Abbink, A. Mulder, J. Sanchez-Pellicer, O. Martinez, H. Plass, S. Dasiopoulou, R. Carlini, M. Farrús, M. Domínguez, S. Mille, A. Burga, E. Kamateri, T. Mavropoulos, S. Symeonidis, G. Meditskos, S. Vrochidis, T. Fraga, D. Schiller and L. Pragst
D7.5 - Final System
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), March 2018
Bibtex

L. Wanner, A. Ehmann, M. Brachthäuser, G. Eschweiler, L. Pragst, O. Martinez, D. Schiller, F. Lingenfelser, B. Vieru, M. Farrús, S. Mille, M. Domínguez, J. Blat, H. Plass, G. Meditskos and B. Schäfer
D8.9 - Final System Report
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), March 2018
Bibtex

T. Sánchez, L. Pragst, M. Farrús, D. Schiller, J. Blat, G. Meditskos, B. Vieru, M. Brachthäuser and L. Stellingwerff
D9.7 - Final innovation, exploitation and business report
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), March 2018
Bibtex

2017

L. Pragst, G. Meditskos and N. Wagner
D 2.5 - Advanced Version of the KRISTINA Generic Adaptive Dialogue Manager
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), December 2017
Bibtex

L. Pragst, O. Martinez and M. Farrús
D9.6 - Final Dissemination Report
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), December 2017
Bibtex

C. Baudracco, S. Symeonidis, T. Mavropoulos, I. Gialampoukidis, E. Kamateri, G. Meditskos, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris, D. Schiller, F. Lingenfelser, L. Pragst, O. Martinez, M. Farrús, S. Mille, A. Burga, J. Blat, H. Plass, B. Schäfer, V. Sarholz, T. Fraga and L. Stellingwerff
D8.8 - Second Prototype Evaluation Report
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), August 2017
Bibtex

A. Stam, L. Stellingwerff, H. Abbink, A. Mulder, J. Sanchez-Pellicer, O. Martinez, G. Llorach, S. Dasiopoulou, R. Carlini, M. Farrús, M. Domínguez, S. Mille, A. Burga, E. Kamateri, T. Mavropoulos, S. Symeonidis, G. Meditskos, S. Vrochidis, T. Fraga, D. Schiller and L. Pragst
D7.4 - Second Prototype
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), May 2017
Bibtex

L. Wanner, L. Pragst, T. Fraga, M. Farrús, S. Mille, G. Llorach, O. Martinez, F. Lingenfelser, I. Kompatsiaris, G. Meditskos, E. Kamateri, A. Stam, L. Stellingwerff, J. Mohr and C. Baudracco
D1.4 - Self Assessment Plan v2
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), February 2017
Bibtex

C. Baudracco, A. Stam, H. Abbink, S. Mille, T. Fraga, J. Mohr, B. Schäfer, S. Vrochidis, F. Lingenfelser and L. Pragst
D9.5 - Initial innovation, exploitation and business plan
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), February 2017
Bibtex

2016

L. Stellingwerff, E. Kamateri, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris, G. Meditskos, J. Mohr, B. Schäfer, G. Eschweiler, D. Schiller, M. Farrús, S. Dasiopoulou, G. Llorach, A. Burga, S. Mille, O. Martinez, L. Pragst and T. Fraga
D8.5 - First Prototype Evaluation Report
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), November 2016
Bibtex

A. Stam, L. Stellingwerff, H. Abbink, A. Mulder, J. Sanchez-Pellicer, O. Martinez, G. Llorach, S. Dasiopoulou, R. Carlini, M. Farrús, M. Domínguez, S. Mille, A. Burga, E. Kamateri, T. Mavropoulos, G. Meditskos, S. Vrochidis, T. Fraga, D. Schiller and L. Pragst
D7.3 - First Prototype
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), September 2016
Bibtex

L. Pragst, W. Minker and L. Wanner
D2.4 - Basic Version of the KRISTINA Generic Adaptive Dialogue Manager
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), August 2016
Bibtex

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

L. Pragst, G. Mehlmann, S. Dasiopoulou, E. Kamateri, G. Meditskos, S. Ultes, L. Stellingwerff, W. Minker and L. Wanner
D2.2 - Integration of the OwlSpeak Platform into the KRISTINA Architecture
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), February 2016
Bibtex

A. Stam, L. Stellingwerff, G. Pazienza, A. Salden, H. Abbink, A. Evans, L. Wanner, G. Llorach, R. Carlini, M. Domínguez, F. Lingenfelser, T. Baur, D. Schiller, G. Mehlmann, E. Kamateri, S. Vrochidis, G. Meditskos, Y. Josse, B. Vieru, S. Ultes, L. Pragst and M. Kraus
D7.2 - Setup of an operational system platform
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), February 2016
Bibtex

2015

G. Meditskos, E. Kamateri, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris, S. Dasiopoulou, L. Wanner, L. Pragst, D. Schiller, F. Lingenfelser, A. Stam and F. Sukno
D5.2 - Ontologies and ontology - based reasoning design
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), December 2015
Bibtex

A. Stam, L. Stellingwerff, G. Pazienza, H. Abbink, A. Evans, L. Wanner, G. Llorach, R. Carlini, F. Lingenfelser, T. Baur, D. Schiller, E. Kamateri, S. Vrochidis, Y. Josse, B. Vieru, S. Ultes, L. Pragst and M. Kraus
D7.1 - Roadmap for the development of the KRISTINA agent
Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), November 2015
Bibtex

S. Ultes, L. Pragst and W. Minker
D2.1 - Requirements for Dialogue Management in adaptive Human-Machine-Communication
Public Deliverable, The KRISTINA Project (H2020-645012), August 2015
Bibtex

Ich übernehme gerne die Betreuung von Bachelor und Master Arbeiten aus dem Bereich meines Promotionsthemas. Wenn du interessiert bist oder einen Vorschlag hast, schreibe mir einfach eine E-Mail.

I gladly supervise bachelor's and master's theses within my PhD topic. Just write an email if you are interested or have a proposal.

In Progress/Completed

Embedded Aigaion Query 2017

Master Thesis
Emotion Estimation from Semantic Content
2017

Teaching Assistance

  • Dialogue Systems, WS 2015/2016

Projects and Seminars

  • Dialogue Systems Project, WS 2015/16
  • Seminar Dialogue Systems, SS 2016
  • Seminar Dialogue Systems, WS 2016/17
  • Seminar Dialogue Systems, SS 2017

Research Assistant

Dr. rer. nat. Louisa Pragst

Louisa Pragst
Dr. rer. nat. Louisa Pragst
Graduation Date: 14.11.2022
First Employment: Carl Zeiss, Germany