We have developed interactive multimodal software tutors to teach users how to use a spoken dialogue timetable by guiding users and monitoring their interaction. They feature a visual representation of the spoken dialogue to support error recognition and recovery and thus helping the users to learn the required interaction style. Two different versions of tutoring were compared to a static web ...

We describe an evaluation of spoken dialogue strategies designed using hierarchical reinforcement learning agents. The dialogue strategies were learnt in a simulated environment and tested in a laboratory setting with 32 users. These dialogues were used to evaluate three types of machine dialogue behaviour: hand-coded, fully-learnt and semi-learnt. These experiments also served to evaluate the ...

An Intelligent Environment is a physical space that becomes augmented with computation, communication and digital content, thus transcending the limits of direct human perception. Spoken dialogue is a key factor for user-friendly humancomputer interaction. This article details how to integrate Spoken Dialogue Systems into Intelligent Environments. We will outline research areas and future trend...

Diagnostic evaluation is an important instrument for the development of high quality spoken language dialogue systems. Yet no rigorous methodology exists for the systematic and exhaustive diagnostic evaluation of all aspects of spoken language interaction: recognition, synthesis, grammar , vocabulary, dialogue etc. The paper addresses part of this problem by presenting a methodology for the dia...

Recent research into the acquisition of spoken language has stressed the importance of learning through embodied linguistic interaction with caregivers rather than through passive observation. However the necessity of interaction makes experimental work into the simulation of infant speech acquisition difficult because of the technical complexity of building real-time embodied systems. In this ...

We report on recent work on human-robot spoken dialogue interaction in the context of Hygeiorobot, a project that aims to build a mobile robotic assistant for hospitals. Spoken dialogue systems are particularly suitable to this context, as the robot does not carry a keyboard or other common interaction devices, and is intended to be used by people with little or no computing experience. In this...

In recent decades, the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has led to increasing use AI speaking apps in foreign language learning. This research investigates impact social network-based interaction on students’ English practice with assistance China. During summer vacation, 70 students from different Chinese universities and majors were recruited for experiment. They r...

We present a method for comparing the spoken aspects of communication in two different types ofvideo mediated meetings with spoken communication in faceto face meetings. Based on an analysis of the media characteristics offace-to-face communication, we derive a set of predictions about how the spoken characteristics of communication will differ in these two systems, as compared with face-to-fac...