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In this paper, we present an Arabic dialogue system (also referred to as a conversational agent) intended to interact with hotel customers and generate responses about reserving a hotel room and other services. The system uses text-based natural language dialogue to navigate customers to the desired answers. We describe the two main modules used in our system: the parser and the dialogue manager. The parser is based on the Government and Binding theory. Customers can inquire about room availability, hotel services and negotiate a desired reservation. We report an experiment with 500 volunteers unfamiliar with the system in a real environment. The users were asked to interact with the system and then to judge the dialogues as "very bad," "bad," "neutral," "good," or "very good." We found that 66.92% of the dialogues were judged to be "very good" and 92.3% were judged to be "good" or "very good". These results confirm the viability of using an Arabic dialogue system to tackle the problem of interactive Arabic dialogues. Finally, we discuss future directions for enhancing our dialogue system with more sophisticated and intuitive interaction.

The research focus in our paper is twofold: (a) to examine the extent to which simple Arabic sentence structures comply with the Government and Binding Theory (GB), and (b) to implement a simple Arabic Context Free Grammar (CFG) parser to analyze input sentence structures to improve some Arabic Natural Language Processing (ANLP) Applications.Here we present a parser that employs Chomsky's Government and Binding (GB) theory to better understand the syntactic structure of Arabic sentences. We consider different simple word orders in Arabic and show how they are derived. We analyze different sentence orders including Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), Verb-Object-Subject (VOS), Verb-Subject-Object (VSO), nominal sentences, nominal sentences beginning with inna (and sisters) and question sentences. We tackle the analysis of the structures to develop syntactic rules for a fragment of Arabic grammar. We include two sets of rules: (1) rules on sentence structures that do not account for case and (2) rules on sentence structures that account for case of Noun Phrases (NPs). We present an implementation of the grammar rules in Prolog. The experiments revealed high accuracy in case assignment in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in the light of GB theory especially when the input sentences are tagged with identification of end cases.

In this paper, we employ the Government and Binding theory (GB) to present a system that analyzes the syntactic structure of some simple Arabic sentences structures. We consider different word orders in Arabic and show how they are derived. We include an analysis of Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), Verb-Object-Subject (VOS), Verb-Subject-Object (VSO), nominal sentences, nominal sentences with inna (or sisters), and question sentences. We use the analysis to develop syntactic rules for a fragment of Arabic, such that we include two sets of rules (1) rules on sentences structures that do not account for case and (2) rules on sentences structures that account for Noun Phrases (NPs) case. We present an implementation of the grammar rules in prolog. The results of testing the system t were reasonable with a high accuracy especially when the input sentences are tagged with identification of end cases.

We propose a partial information state-based framework for collaborative dialogue and argument between agents. We employ a three-valued based nonmonotonic logic, NML3, for representing and reasoning about Partial Information States (PIS). NML3 formalizes some aspects of revisable reasoning and it is sound and complete. Within the framework of NML3, we present a formalization of some basic dialogue moves and the rules of protocols of some types of dialogue. The rules of a protocol are nonmonotonic in the sense that the set of propositions to which an agent is committed and the validity of moves vary from one move to another. The use of PIS allows an agent to expand consistently its viewpoint with some of the propositions to which another agent, involved in a dialogue, is overtly committed. A proof method for the logic NML3 has been successfully implemented as an automatic theorem prover. We show, via some examples, that the tableau method employed to implement the theorem prover allows an agent, absolute access to every stage of a proof process. This access is useful for constructive argumentation and for finding cooperative and/or informative answers.