We describe our work in building a spoken language interface for a tutorial dialogue system. Our goal is to allow natural, unrestricted student interaction with the computer tutor, which has been shown to improve the student’s learning gain, but presents challenges for speech recognition and spoken language understanding. We discuss the choice of system components and present the results of dev...

In this paper I present a continual context-sensitive abductive framework for understanding situated spoken natural dialogue. The framework builds up and refines a set of partial defeasible explanations of the spoken input, trying to infer the speaker’s intention. These partial explanations are conditioned on the eventual verification of the knowledge gaps they contain. This verification is don...

The paper discusses a framework for planning contributions in a spoken dialogue system, and focuses especially on the three I's: Incrementality, Immediacy, and Interactivity. The emphasis is on communicative principles and the notion of NewInfo, or the information focus of the utterance. NewInfo provides a natural way of to conceptualize the planning process and to generate utterances on the le...

In this paper, we describe a generation system for spoken dialogue that not only produces coherent, informative and responsive dialogue contributions, but also explicitly models human styles of interaction. This generation system is based on conversation acts theory. It has been implemented in the TRIPS spoken dialogue system, and includes components that plan content, perform surface generatio...

Although speech is a highly natural mode of communication, building robust and usable speech-based interfaces is still a challenge, even if the target user group is restricted to younger users. When designing for older users, there are added complications due to cognitive, physiological, and anatomical ageing. Users may also find it difficult to adapt to the interaction style required by the sp...

Human interaction with spoken dialogue systems differ in many ways from their interactions with each other. One notable example is that spoken dialogue systems tend to have a strict concept of turns which makes the dialogue more similar to a ping-pong game than to humans conversing. Given that we aim at creating spoken dialogue systems that can engage in human-like conversation (note that altho...

In this paper. we argue for a paradigm shift in spoken language technology, from transcription tasks to interactive systems. The current paradigm evaluates speech recognition technology in terms of word recognition accuracy on large vocabulary transcription tasks? such as telephone conversations or media broadcasts. Systems are evaluated in international competitions, with strict rules for part...

Graphical elements have been found very useful when spoken dialogue systems are developed and demonstrated. However, most of the spoken dialogue systems are designed for speechonly interaction and are very hard to extent to contain graphical elements. We introduce a general model to visualize speech interfaces. Based on the model we present an implemented visualization framework, and several ex...

the directional response and roll stability characteristics of a partly filled tractor semi-trailer vehicle, with cylindrical tank, are investigated in various maneuvers. the dynamic interaction of liquid cargo with the tractor semi-trailer vehicle is also evaluated by integrating a dynamic slosh model of the partly filled tank with five-degrees-of-freedom of a tractor semi-trailer tank model. ...

The past few years have seen considerable progress in the deployment of voice-enabled personal assistants, first on smartphones (such as Apple’s Siri) and most recently as standalone devices in people’s homes (such as Amazon’s Alexa). Such ‘intelligent’ communicative agents are distinguished from the previous generation of speech-based systems in that they claim to offer access to services and ...