Laboratory of Searching and Dialogue

Laboratory of Searching and Dialogue focuses on research in two intuitively interconnected disciplines - searching in collections of digital data and dialogue systems - which have been observed as completely independent in the past.

The field of dialogue systems includes not only specification and implementation of underlying models, dialogue strategies, descriptive languages, but also basic speech-processing technologies (recognition and synthesis). Quality of dialogue systems is chiefly influenced by quality of information a search engine retrieves, which is in turn used for generation of responses to users' queries. This implies an effective searching in various collections of data.

Traditional retrieval techniques based on exact match are inapplicable in such environments. Proximity concepts (similarity) are typically much more fruitful for retrieving documents. Laboratory concerns index structures for similarity searching in both centralized and distributed environments. Dialogue systems supported by similarity searching forms a modern and perspective field with direct impacts on future information technology. Students interested are invited to join the laboratory, where they can co-operate on various implementation and research projects.

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