Integrating spoken dialog and question answering: the ritel project

The Ritel project aims at integrating spoken language dialog and open-domain information retrieval to allow a human to ask general questions (e.g. Who is currently presiding the French Senate?) and refine her search interactively. This project is at the junction of several distinct research communities, and has therefore several challenges to tackle: real-time streamed speech recognition with very large vocabulary, open-domain dialog management, fast information retrieval from text, query cobuilding, communication between information retrieval and dialog components, and generation of natural sounding answers. In this paper, we present our work on the different components of Ritel, and provide initial results.