This paper proposes a new dataset, Frames, composed of 1369 human-human dialogues with an average of 15 turns per dialogue.This corpus contains goal-oriented dialogues between users who are given some constraints to book a trip and assistants who search a database to find appropriate trips.The users exhibit complex decision-making behaviour which involve comparing trips, exploring different options, and selecting among the trips that were discussed during the dialogue.To drive research on dialogue systems towards handling such behaviour, we have annotated and released the dataset and we propose in this paper a task called frame tracking.This task consists of keeping track of different semantic frames throughout each dialogue.We propose a rule-based baseline and analyse the frame tracking task through this baseline.

In interactive plan-based narrative environments, users' actions must be monitored to ensure that conditions necessary for the execution of narrative plans are not compromised. In the Zocalo system, management of user actions has been performed on a reactionary basis by a process called mediation. In this paper, we describe an extension to this approach,proactive mediation, which calculates responses to user input in an anticipatory manner. A proactive mediation module accepts as input a plan describing the actions being performed by the user (generated by a plan recognition system) and identifies portions of that plan that jeopardize the causal structure of the overall narrative. Once these portions are identified, proactive mediation generates modifications to the narrative plan structure that avoid the unwanted interaction between user and story. This extension to the original mediation algorithm provides more responses to a user's actions and generates responses that are tailored to the user's activity.

We analyze collaborative play in an online video game, World of Warcraft, the most popular personal computer game in the United States, with significant markets in Asia and Europe. Based on an immersive ethnographic study, we describe how the social organization of the game and player culture affect players' enjoyment and learning of the game. We discovered that play is characterized by a multiplicity of collaborations from brief informal encounters to highly organized play in structured groups. The variety of collaborations makes the game more fun and provides rich learning opportunities. We contrast these varied collaborations, including those with strangers, to the gold standard of Gemeinschaft-like communities of close relations in tightknit groups. We suggest populations for whom similar games could be designed.

We present data from detailed observation of 24 information workers that shows that they experience work fragmentation as common practice. We consider that work fragmentation has two components: length of time spent in an activity, and frequency of interruptions. We examined work fragmentation along three dimensions: effect of collocation, type of interruption, and resumption of work. We found work to be highly fragmented: people average little time in working spheres before switching and 57% of their working spheres are interrupted. Collocated people work longer before switching but have more interruptions. Most internal interruptions are due to personal work whereas most external interruptions are due to central work. Though most interrupted work is resumed on the same day, more than two intervening activities occur before it is. We discuss implications for technology design: how our results can be used to support people to maintain continuity within a larger framework of their working spheres.