A Concurrent, Distributed, and Incremental Spoken Dialogue Architecture with a First Application to Prosody

Current-day spoken dialogue systems are tedious to interact with (Ward et al. 2005). eir naturalness and (measurable) quality of interaction can be improved through incremental (step-by-step) processing schemes that enable dialogue systems to interact continuously (Baumann 2013). However, incremental models have not yet adequately addressed the challenge of joint decision making and optimization of hypotheses across the multitude of components within a modularized system in real-time, mostly because their data-žows follow simple pipeline approaches. Ad-hoc integration of modules fails completely for distributed systems which are preferred in robotics, for research systems, and in mobile applications. is shortcoming impedes incremental spoken dialogue systems to leverage their full potential. is project proposes to design and implement an architecture for concurrent, distributed incremental processing and knowledge representation for spoken dialogue in which components share their understanding and collaborate on the emergence of desirable dialogue behaviour. e architecture will be applied to (limited) spoken dialogue domains. Prosody and timing are key issues to successful interaction and control dialogue žow, regardless of its content. us, the project will focus on the interaction between speakers on the prosodic level.