Spoken Dialogue Technology

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

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.

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.

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.

Dialogue systems are a very appealing technology with an extraordinary future. Spoken, Multilingual and Multimodal Dialogues Systems: Development and Assessment addresses the great demand for information about the development of advanced dialogue systems combining speech with other modalities under a multilingual framework. It aims to give a systematic overview of dialogue systems and recent advances in the practical application of spoken dialogue systems. Spoken Dialogue Systems are computer-based systems developed to provide information and carry out simple tasks using speech as the interaction mode. Examples include travel information and reservation, weather forecast information, directory information and product order. Multimodal Dialogue Systems aim to overcome the limitations of spoken dialogue systems which use speech as the only communication means, while Multilingual Systems allow interaction with users that speak different languages. Presents a clear snapshot of the structure of a standard dialogue system, by addressing its key components in the context of multilingual and multimodal interaction and the assessment of spoken, multilingual and multimodal systems In addition to the fundamentals of the technologies employed, the development and evaluation of these systems are described Highlights recent advances in the practical application of spoken dialogue systems This comprehensive overview is a must for graduate students and academics in the fields of speech recognition, speech synthesis, speech processing, language, and human–computer interaction technolgy. It will also prove to be a valuable resource to system developers working in these areas.

This book compiles and presents a synopsis on current global research efforts to push forward the state of the art in dialogue technologies, including advances to language and context understanding, and dialogue management, as well as human–robot interaction, conversational agents, question answering and lifelong learning for dialogue systems.

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