In this paper we study how to address the assessment of affective speech corpora. We propose the use of several coefficients and provide guidelines to obtain a more complete background about the quality of their annotation. This proposal has been evaluated employing a corpus of non-acted emotions gathered from spontaneous interactions of users with a spoken dialogue system. The results show tha...

In this paper, we study the impact of considering context information for the annotation of emotions. Concretely, we propose the inclusion of the history of user–system interaction and the neutral speaking style of users. A new method to automatically include both sources of information has been developed making use of novel techniques for acoustic normalization and dialogue context annotation....

Speech and hand gestures offer the most natural modalities for everyday human-to-human interaction. The availability of diverse spoken dialogue applications and the proliferation of accelerometers on consumer electronics allow the introduction of new interaction paradigms based on speech and gestures. Little attention has been paid however to the manipulation of spoken dialogue systems through ...

In this paper we discuss the recent evolution of spoken dialog systems in commercial deployments. Yet based on a simple finite state machine design paradigm, dialog systems reached today a higher level of complexity. The availability of massive amounts of data during deployment led to the development of continuous optimization strategy pushing the design and development of spoken dialog applica...

Organizations are increasingly turning to spoken dialog systems for automated call routing to reduce call center costs. To maintain quality service even in cases of failure, these systems often resort to ad-hoc rules for dispatching calls to a human operator. We present a principled procedure for determining when callers should be transferred to operators based on a cost-benefit analysis. The p...

In this document, we illustrate how complex questions such as procedural (how-to) ones can be addressed in an interactive format by means of a spoken dialogue system. The advantages of interactivity and in particular of spoken dialogue with respect to standard Question Answering settings are numerous. First, addressing user needs that do not necessarily arise in front of a computer; moreover, a...

In this paper, we test the applicability of a stochastic user simulation technique to generate dialogs which are similar to real human-machine spoken interactions. To do so, we present a comparison between two corpora employing a comprehensive set of evaluation measures. The first corpus was acquired from real interactions of users with a spoken dialog system, whereas the second was generated b...

Uncertainty plays a central role in the handling of failures in conversation. People manage uncertainty by establishing and maintaining the mutual belief that their utterances have been understood well enough for current purposes, a process referred to as grounding. In this paper, we propose a computational architecture for supporting grounding in human-computer spoken dialog. We delineate four...