The Companions project is a 4 year, EU funded Framework Programme 6 project involving a consortium of 16 partners across 8 countries. Its aim is to develop a personalised conversational interface, one that knows and understands its owner, and can access resources on the Internet. It does this whilst nurturing an emotional, psychological and social involvement from its owner (user seems an inapp...

This paper presents a multimodal corpus of spoken human-human dialogues collected as participants played a series of Rapid Dialogue Games (RDGs). The corpus consists of a collection of about 11 hours of spoken audio, video, and Microsoft Kinect data taken from 384 game interactions (dialogues). The games used for collecting the corpus required participants to give verbal descriptions of linguis...

Speech and language do not occur in a vacuum much of the meaning of an utterance comes from its context, including when and where it was uttered, what the person saying it was doing at the time, who was there to listen to it, and why the speaker decided to speak in the first place. In my research, I aim to unify a number of disciplines such as speech recognition, discourse modelling, plan recog...

The primary objective of this project is to develop a robust, high-performance, domain-independent spoken language system. This system, termed HARC (Hear and Respond to Continuous speech), is composed of the BYBLOS speech recognition system and the DELPHI natural language understanding system. The goal is to develop systems that exhibit the following advances: high-accuracy speech understanding...

We describe an on-going project whose primary aim is to establish the technology of producing closed captions for TV news programs efficiently using natural language processing and speech recognition techniques for the benefit of the hearing impaired in Japan. The project is supported by the Telecommunications Advancement Organisation of Japan with the help of the ministry of Posts and Telecomm...

It has been shown that in natural speech filled pauses can be beneficial to a listener. In this paper, we attempt to discover whether listeners react in a similar way to filled pauses in synthetic and vocoded speech compared to natural speech. We present two experiments focusing on reaction time to a target word. In the first, we replicate earlier work in natural speech, namely that listeners r...

In this paper, a dialogue system for natural language based call steering is described and studied. The system is based on natural language speech recognition and understanding within a mixed initiative dialogue. The system is implemented on Bell Labs. Speech Technology Integration Platform (BLSTIP) using dialogue and natural language understanding components from BT laboratories. A prototype s...

In this position paper, we propose a different paradigm for using speech to interact with computers: speech for content creation. We survey the literature in automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural language processing (NLP), sentiment detection, and opinion mining to argue that the time has come to use mobile devices to create content on-the-fly. We examine recent work in user modelling and...

We show how several components of the JET natural language analysis tool, originally developed at New York University for the analysis of English text, were adapted to German. These components, such as the part of speech tagger and the noun chunker, are explained in terms that should be understandable to a layman. On the other hand, issues that arise speci cally with regards to the German langu...

Speech understanding is a fundamental feature for many applications focused on human-robot interaction. Although many techniques and several services for speech recognition and natural language understanding have been developed in the last years, specific implementation and validation on domestic service robots have not been performed. In this paper, we describe the implementation and the resul...