Non-lexical speech sounds (conversational grunts), such as uh-huh, un-hn, mm, and oh, are common in English. In human dialogs these sounds are important in conversation control and for conveying attitudes. Spoken dialog systems may make use of these sounds to achieve concise, smooth, relaxed interactions. Doing so is, however, a challenge, because most algorithms used in spoken language process...

Older adults are a challenging user group because their behaviour can be highly variable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study where dialogue strategies are learned and evaluated with both simulated younger users and simulated older users. The simulated users were derived from a corpus of interactions with a strict system-initiative spoken dialogue system (SDS). Learning from s...

This research examines how people integrate spoken and written input during multimodal human-computer interaction. Three studies used a semi-automatic simulation technique to collect data on people's free use of spoken and written input. Within-subject repeated-measures studies were designed, with data analyzed from 44 subjects and 240 tasks. The primary factors that govern people's selection t...

Spoken dialogue technology has emerged over the past decade as a challenging area for researchers in artificial intelligence, speech and language processing, and humancomputer interaction. At the same time a number of leading players in the computing industry have been looking seriously at the commercial potential of interactive spoken and multimodal systems. This paper considers the challenges...

This report is based on an action research multiple baseline design study across five different qualitative aspects of spoken interaction used to evaluate the effectiveness of a flashcard system to improve oral performance in the ESL classroom. The participants were ten children attending third grade in a public school in Bogotá, and who were assessed as having low oral performance in spoken En...

We describe ongoing work to integrate statistical user models in the usability engineering process of spoken dialogue systems. The idea is to generate user dialogue actions up to the spoken utterances in response to system utterances and directly feed them to the system under test. The underlying user models are derived semi-automatically from dialogue corpora. All simulated interactions are lo...

The increasing number of spoken dialog systems calls for efficient approaches for their development and testing. Our goal is the minimization of hand-crafted resources to maximize the portability of this evaluation environment across spoken dialog systems and domains. In this paper we discuss the user simulation technique which allows us to learn general user strategies from a new corpus. We pr...

Optimism is growing that the near future will witness rapid growth in human-computer interaction using voice. System prototypes have recently been built that demonstrate speaker-independent real-time speech recognition, and understanding of naturally spoken utterances with vocabularies of 1000 to 2000 words, and larger. Already, computer manufacturers are building speech recognition subsystems ...

The development of pragmatics as an area of concern within linguistics has carried with it a growing interest in what really happens when we communicate linguistically. Especially, the nature of interaction in spoken language has come under increased scrutiny. In this study, we want to examine a range of spoken language phenomena which we believe have their locus in the relation between the ind...