In a recent study, Martin, Mullennix, Pisoni, and Summers (1989) reported that subjects' accuracy in recalling lists of spoken words was better for words in early list positions when the words were spoken by a single talker than when they were spoken by multiple talkers. The present study was conducted to examine the nature of these effects in further detail. Accuracy of serial-ordered recall w...

Spoken human-machine interaction supported by state-of-theart dialog systems is becoming a standard technology. A lot of effort has been invested for this kind of artificial communication interface. But still the spoken dialog systems (SDS) are not able to provide to the users a natural way of communication. Most part of the existing automated dialog systems is based on a questionnaire based st...

We describe an experimental Wizard-of-Oz-setup for the integration of emotional strategies into spoken dialogue management. With this setup we seek to evaluate different approaches to emotional dialogue strategies in human computer interaction with a spoken dialogue system. The study aims to analyse what kinds of emotional strategies work best in spoken dialogue management especially facing the...

The effects of word frequency (WF) and syllable frequency (SF) are well-established phenomena in domain such as spoken production in alphabetic languages. Chinese, as a non-alphabetic language, presents unique lexical and phonological properties in speech production. For example, the proximate unit of phonological encoding is syllable in Chinese but segments in Dutch, French or English. The pre...

We present an approach to hands-free interaction with autonomous robots through spoken dialog. Our approach is based on passive knowledge rarefication through goal disambiguation, a technique that allows the robot to refine and acquire knowledge through spoken dialog with a human operator. A key assumption underlying our approach is that the operator and the robot share the same set of goals. A...

We present a physical multimodal conversational Companion in the area of health and fitness. Conversational spoken dialogues using physical agents provide a potential interface for applications which are aimed at motivating and supporting users. Open source software called jNabServer, which enables spoken and multimodal interaction with Nabaztag/tag wireless rabbits, is presented together with ...

This research characterizes the spontaneous spoken disfluencies typical of human-computer interaction, and presents a predictive model accounting for their occurrence. Data were collected during three empirical studies in which people spoke or wrote to a highly interactive simulated system. The studies involved within-subject factorial designs in which input modality and presentation format wer...

In this paper, we present an architecture to create a multidomain spoken dialog system with minimum effort by composing heterogeneous pre-existent spoken dialog systems into a new system able to perform richer interactions. A Task Manager acts as a proxy for the different sub-domains and activates one of the systems each turn. The different sub-systems are not aware that they are used in a mult...

We describe the MonAMI Reminder, a multimodal spoken dialogue system which can assist elderly and disabled people in organising and initiating their daily activities. Based on deep interviews with potential users, we have designed a calendar and reminder application which uses an innovative mix of an embodied conversational agent, digital pen and paper, and the web to meet the needs of those us...

As a priority-setting exercise, we compared interactions between users and a simple spoken dialog system to interactions between users and a human operator. We observed usability events, places in which system behavior differed from human behavior, and for each we noted the impact, root causes, and prospects for improvement. We suggest some priority issues for research, involving not only such ...