This paper presents an approach to processing of ambiguous requests in spoken dialogs in information train timetable service systems. The main problem of human-machine interaction is in the fact, that speaking human does not express some essential information, because it results from the receiver’s knowledge and the dialog context. Therefore the real understanding system have to combine the inc...

The paper presents a multimodal conversational interaction system for the Nao humanoid robot. The system was developed at the 8th International Summer Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces, Metz, 2012. We implemented WikiTalk, an existing spoken dialogue system for open-domain conversations, on Nao. This greatly extended the robot’s interaction capabilities by enabling Nao to talk about an unlimite...

In spoken dialog systems, information must be presented sequentially, making it difficult to quickly browse through a large number of options. Recent studies have shown that user satisfaction is negatively correlated with dialog duration, suggesting that systems should be designed to maximize the efficiency of the interactions. Analysis of the logs of 2,000 dialogs between users and nine differ...

This paper describes the design of a multimodal spoken dialogue system using Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) to enable embodied conversational virtual health coach agents to deliver brief interventions for lifestyle behavior change in particular excessive alcohol consumption. Its contribution is two fold. First, it is the first attempt to-date to study stochastic dialogue policy optimization t...

This paper reports on the creation of the multimodal NIMITEK corpus of affected behavior in human-machine interaction and its role in the development of the NIMITEK prototype system. The NIMITEK prototype system is a spoken dialogue system for supporting users while they solve problems in a graphics system. The central feature of the system is adaptive dialogue management. The system dynamicall...

The Olga project has developed an animated agent interface for information services. The interface combines a graphical interface, spoken dialogue and an animated 3D ‘human-like’ character for multimodal input and output. The interaction is intelligently managed using techniques derived from spoken dialogue but extended for the graphical modality. The Olga agent is innovative in combining a spo...

Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) simulations are a popular means for investigating the properties of human-computer interaction. In this paper the findings from a WOZ experiment for evaluating different design options for a spoken dialogue system are presented. In addition to the documentation of the outcomes of this evaluation in terms of standard quantitative measures we also present findings from a more q...

This paper describes several experiments aimed at the long term goal of enabling a spoken conversational system to automatically improve its pronunciation lexicon over time through direct interactions with end users and from available Web sources. We selected a set of 200 rare words from the OGI corpus of spoken names, and performed several experiments combining spelling and pronunciation infor...