Spontaneous-Speech Dialogue System In Limited Domains (98 - 01)

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Project Overview (I)

• Spontaneous-Speech Dialogue System In Limited
  Domains (98 - 01)
• Development of an oral human-machine interface,
  by way of dialogue, for a semantically limited
  task Queries into a database with information on
  Spanish trains
• Supported by CICYT(Comisión Interministerial de
  Ciencia y Tecnologia) of Spanish Government

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Project Spontaneous-Speech Dialogue System In
Limited Domains (I)

• Partners list
• EHU (Universidad del Pais Vasco)
• UJI (Universidad Jaume I, Castellón)
• UPC-I (Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña)
• UPC-T (Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña)
• UPV (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia)
• UZ (Universidad de Zaragoza)

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Project Spontaneous-Speech Dialogue System In
Limited Domains (II)

• Project tasks (I)
• The acquisition of a corpus so as to study the
  dialogue in the task.
• A study on spontaneous speech and its
  modelling.
• The development of robust speech signal
  modelling techniques, to cope with variations due
  to speaker, background and channel effects.

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Project Spontaneous-Speech Dialogue System In
Limited Domains (III)

• Project tasks (II)
• The study and development of the dialogue system
  in the semantically restricted environment of the
  task
• The speech recognition module
• The understanding module
• The system that will generate an oral answer

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Project Spontaneous-Speech Dialogue System In
Limited Domains (IV)

• Project tasks (III)
• The development of a prototype of the dialogue
  system for railway information in Spanish over
  the telephone network.

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Project Spontaneous-Speech Dialogue System In
Limited Domains (V)

• Why the railway information task was chosen?
• Delimited task. Easy to understand
• Vocabulary stable. There are no foreign word (As
  in flights information or entertainment)
• Rich conversations. Several turn-taking

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Project Spontaneous-Speech Dialogue System In
Limited Domains (VI)

• Why the railway information task was chosen?
• Delimited task. Easy to understand
• Vocabulary stable. There are no foreign word (As
  in flights information or entertainment)
• Rich conversations. Several turn-taking

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Adquisition of the person-to-person corpus (I)

• 200 conversations from the RENFE call information
  centre.
• Calls from Barcelona. In Spanish.
• Selection of different ways of asking for
  information
• Language too complex

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Adquisition of the person-to-person corpus (II)

• Redefinition the task.
• Eliminating complexes
• Design of the Dialog Controller.
• Design of the Answer Generator
• Preparing the man-machine corpus

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Adquisition of the man-machine corpus

• People uses different when they talk to a machine
  
• The wizard of Oz strategy allows the obtaining
  examples before the systed is developed

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Project Overview (II)

• aTTemps (accès telefonic al Temps)
• aTTemps is an automatic system to access
  meteorological information by phone.
• Supported by
• Catalunya Government
• Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
• Universitat de Barcelona

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Project aTTemps (accès telefonic al Temps)

• Provides personalized real-time data on a set of
  meteorological conditions on each place of the
  Catalan geography
• In Catalan language
• Phone [phone] (in Spain).
• http//www.smc.gencat.es

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The Dialogue Manager Module in aTTemps (I)

• Main goals
• Provide the right information in minimum time
• Guiding the user in order to avoid situations
  where she will be lost

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The Dialogue Manager Module in aTTemps (II)

• Strategy
• Dialogue Flow. Barge-in
• Confirmation policy
• Implicit as a general rule
• Explicit in critical situations
• Amount of Data per Turn
• Considering the complexity
• Helping features. Helping messages
• Language generation
• Using templates

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aTTemps An example of conversation

• System Welcome to the ATTEMPS meteorological
  warning and information system. You can always
  say help, correction, repetition or exit. From
  which Catalan place do you want information, or
  do you want to establish a warning?
• User I am interested in Barcelona, please.
• System From Badalona, which information do you
  need?
• User I want to correct, not from Badalona.
• System From which Catalan place do you want
  information
• User I want to know the weather right now in
  Barcelona.
• System From Barcelona, which information do you
  need?
• User I need the temperature, please.
• System In the last measure at 1430h, the
  temperature was 20 degrees. Do you need any other
  information
• User No, thanks.
• System Thanks for calling