Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology And Design

Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology and Design covers key topics in the field of spoken language dialogue interaction from a variety of leading researchers. It brings together several perspectives in the areas of corpus annotation and analysis, dialogue system construction, as well as theoretical perspectives on communicative intention, context-based generation, and modelling of discourse structure. These topics are all part of the general research and development within the area of discourse and dialogue with an emphasis on dialogue systems; corpora and corpus tools and semantic and pragmatic modelling of discourse and dialogue.

Spoken Dialogue Technology provides extensive coverage of spoken dialogue systems, ranging from the theoretical underpinnings of the study of dialogue through to a detailed look at a number of well-established methods and tools for developing spoken dialogue systems. The book enables students and practitioners to design and test dialogue systems using several available development environments and languages, including the CSLU toolkit, VoiceXML, SALT, and XHTML+ voice. This practical orientation is usually available otherwise only in reference manuals supplied with software development kits. The latest research in spoken dialogue systems is presented along with extensive coverage of the most relevant theoretical issues and a critical evaluation of current research prototypes. A dedicated web site containing supplementary materials, code, links to resources will enable readers to develop and test their own systems (). Previously such materials have been difficult to track down, available only on a range of disparate web sites and this web site provides a unique and useful reference source which will prove invaluable.

Considerable progress has been made in recent years in the development of dialogue systems that support robust and efficient human-machine interaction using spoken language. Spoken dialogue technology allows various interactive applications to be built and used for practical purposes, and research focuses on issues that aim to increase the system's communicative competence by including aspects of error correction, cooperation, multimodality, and adaptation in context. This book gives a comprehensive view of state-of-the-art techniques that are used to build spoken dialogue systems. It provides an overview of the basic issues such as system architectures, various dialogue management methods, system evaluation, and also surveys advanced topics concerning extensions of the basic model to more conversational setups. The goal of the book is to provide an introduction to the methods, problems, and solutions that are used in dialogue system development and evaluation. It presents dialogue modelling and system development issues relevant in both academic and industrial environments and also discusses requirements and challenges for advanced interaction management and future research. Table of Contents: Preface / Introduction to Spoken Dialogue Systems / Dialogue Management / Error Handling / Case Studies: Advanced Approaches to Dialogue Management / Advanced Issues / Methodologies and Practices of Evaluation / Future Directions / References / Author Biographies

This book presents the outcomes of the 9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems (IWSDS), “Towards creating more human-like conversational agent technologies”. It compiles and provides a synopsis of current global research to push forward the state of the art in dialogue technologies, including advances in the context of the classical problems of language understanding, dialogue management and language generation, as well as cognitive topics related to the human nature of conversational phenomena, such as humor, empathy and social context understanding and awareness.

Advances in Commercial Deployment of Spoken Dialog Systems covers the peculiarities of commercial deployments of spoken dialog systems, from the tools, standards, and design principles to build them, the infrastructure to deploy them, techniques to monitor, evaluate, and analyze them, and, most importantly, effective strategies to adapt, tune, and optimize them. The book shows to what extent academic spoken dialog system research converges with real-world applications. This academic and practical synergy can be leveraged to build successful and robust spoken dialog applications that are useful when dealing with the dynamics of the ever-changing future user.

This volume includes proceedings articles presented at the Workshop on Paralinguistic Information and its Integration in Spoken Dialogue Systems held in Granada, Spain. The material focuses on the three broad areas of spoken dialogue systems for robotics, emotions and spoken dialogue systems, and Spoken dialogue systems for real-world applications The workshop proceedings are part of the 3rd Annual International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems, which brings together researchers from all over the world working in the field of spoken dialogue systems. It provides an international forum for the presentation of research and applications, and for lively discussions among researchers as well as industrialists.

Annotation. This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems, IWDS 2010, held in Gotemba, Japan, in October 2010. The 22 session papers presented together with 2 invited keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers deal with topics around Spoken Dialogue Systems for Ambient Environment and discuss common issues of theories, applications, evaluation, limitations, general tools and techniques.

In Monitoring Adaptive Spoken Dialog Systems, authors Alexander Schmitt and Wolfgang Minker investigate statistical approaches that allow for recognition of negative dialog patterns in Spoken Dialog Systems (SDS). The presented stochastic methods allow a flexible, portable and accurate use. Beginning with the foundations of machine learning and pattern recognition, this monograph examines how frequently users show negative emotions in spoken dialog systems and develop novel approaches to speech-based emotion recognition using hybrid approach to model emotions. The authors make use of statistical methods based on acoustic, linguistic and contextual features to examine the relationship between the interaction flow and the occurrence of emotions using non-acted recordings several thousand real users from commercial and non-commercial SDS. Additionally, the authors present novel statistical methods that spot problems within a dialog based on interaction patterns. The approaches enable future SDS to offer more natural and robust interactions. This work provides insights, lessons and inspiration for future research and development, not only for spoken dialog systems, but for data-driven approaches to human-machine interaction in general.