Spoken dialogue systems

• Main Author: Jokinen, Kristiina.
• Other Authors: McTear, Michael.
• Format: Electronic
• Language: English
• Published: San Rafael, Calif. (1537 Fourth Street, San Rafael, CA 94901 USA) : Morgan & Claypool Publishers, c2010.
• Series: Synthesis lectures on human language technologies (Online), # 5.
• Subjects: Natural language processing (Computer science); Automatic speech recognition.
• Online Access: Abstract with links to full text

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 f...

Table of Contents:

• 1. Introduction to spoken dialogue systems
• Examples of spoken dialogue systems
• Basic architecture of a spoken dialogue system
• Speech understanding
• Dialogue manager
• System output
• Application domains for spoken dialogue systems
• Data collection and dialogue corpora
• Evaluating spoken dialogue systems
• Software and toolkits for spoken dialogue systems development
• Academic systems
• Voice XML platforms
• Voice systems on mobile devices
• Individual components
• Summary
• 2. Dialogue management
• Dialogue control
• Graphs
• Frames
• Dialogue modeling
• Dialogue context model
• Dialogue control and dialogue modeling using voice XML
• Statistical approaches to dialogue control and dialogue modeling
• Optimizing dialogue control using RL
• Applying POMDPs to dialogue systems: an example
• Some issues in the application of RL to dialogue management
• Summary
• 3. Error handling
• Approaches to error handling in spoken dialogue
• Error detection
• Error prediction
• Error recovery
• Some new approaches to error handling
• Error handling based on the strategies used by humans in dialogue strategies
• Error handling in the RavenClaw system
• Error handling in the DIHANA project
• Summary.
• 4. Case studies: advanced approaches to dialogue management
• Information state approach
• Plan-based approaches
• Software agents for dialogue management
• The Queen's communicator
• AthosMail system
• The conversational architectures project
• Example: taking decisions
• Corpus-based dialogue management: the DIHANA project
• Selecting the next system act
• Summary
• 5. Advanced issues
• Cooperation and communicative competence
• Adaptation and user modelling
• Multimodality
• Natural interaction
• Summary
• 6. Methodologies and practices of evaluation
• Historical overview
• Some concepts and definitions
• Evaluation approaches and data collection
• Evaluation goals and types of evaluation
• Evaluation measures
• Evaluation frameworks
• The paradise
• Quality of experience
• Usability evaluation
• Special topics in evaluation
• Semiautomatic evaluation
• Standardization
• Challenges for evaluating advanced dialogue systems
• Summary
• 7. Future directions
• Conversational dialogue systems
• Academic and commercial approaches to spoken dialogue technology
• Concluding remarks
• References
• Author biographies.