Towards Adaptive Spoken Dialog Systems


Book Description

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.




Data-Driven Methods for Adaptive Spoken Dialogue Systems


Book Description

Data driven methods have long been used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis and have more recently been introduced for dialogue management, spoken language understanding, and Natural Language Generation. Machine learning is now present “end-to-end” in Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS). However, these techniques require data collection and annotation campaigns, which can be time-consuming and expensive, as well as dataset expansion by simulation. In this book, we provide an overview of the current state of the field and of recent advances, with a specific focus on adaptivity.




Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Dialogue Systems


Book Description

The past decade has seen a revolution in the field of spoken dialogue systems. As in other areas of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, data-driven methods are now being used to drive new methodologies for system development and evaluation. This book is a unique contribution to that ongoing change. A new methodology for developing spoken dialogue systems is described in detail. The journey starts and ends with human behaviour in interaction, and explores methods for learning from the data, for building simulation environments for training and testing systems, and for evaluating the results. The detailed material covers: Spoken and Multimodal dialogue systems, Wizard-of-Oz data collection, User Simulation methods, Reinforcement Learning, and Evaluation methodologies. The book is a research guide for students and researchers with a background in Computer Science, AI, or Machine Learning. It navigates through a detailed case study in data-driven methods for development and evaluation of spoken dialogue systems. Common challenges associated with this approach are discussed and example solutions are provided. This work provides insights, lessons, and inspiration for future research and development – not only for spoken dialogue systems in particular, but for data-driven approaches to human-machine interaction in general.




Spoken Dialogue Systems


Book Description

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 Technology


Book Description

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.




Introducing Spoken Dialogue Systems into Intelligent Environments


Book Description

Introducing Spoken Dialogue Systems into Intelligent Environments outlines the formalisms of a novel knowledge-driven framework for spoken dialogue management and presents the implementation of a model-based Adaptive Spoken Dialogue Manager(ASDM) called OwlSpeak. The authors have identified three stakeholders that potentially influence the behavior of the ASDM: the user, the SDS, and a complex Intelligent Environment (IE) consisting of various devices, services, and task descriptions. The theoretical foundation of a working ontology-based spoken dialogue description framework, the prototype implementation of the ASDM, and the evaluation activities that are presented as part of this book contribute to the ongoing spoken dialogue research by establishing the fertile ground of model-based adaptive spoken dialogue management. This monograph is ideal for advanced undergraduate students, PhD students, and postdocs as well as academic and industrial researchers and developers in speech and multimodal interactive systems.




Towards Autonomous, Adaptive, and Context-Aware Multimodal Interfaces: Theoretical and Practical Issues


Book Description

This volume brings together the advanced research results obtained by the European COST Action 2102: "Cross Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication". The research published in this book was discussed at the 3rd jointly EUCOGII-COST 2102 International Training School entitled "Toward Autonomous, Adaptive, and Context-Aware Multimodal Interfaces: Theoretical and Practical Issues ", held in Caserta, Italy, on March 15-19, 2010. The book is arranged into two scientific sections. The 18 revised papers of the first section, "Human-Computer Interaction: Cognitive and Computational Issues", deal with conjectural and processing issues of defining models, algorithms, and strategies for implementing cognitive behavioural systems. The second section, "Synchrony through Verbal and Nonverbal Signals", presents 21 revised lectures that provide theoretical and practical solutions to the modelling of timing synchronization between linguistic and paralinguistic expressions, actions, body movements, activities in human interaction and on their assistance for an effective communication.




Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language


Book Description

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, PROPOR 2012, held in Coimbra, Portugal in April 2012. The 24 revised full papers and 23 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 86 submissions. These papers cover the areas related to phonology, morphology and POS-Tagging, acquisition, language resources, linguistic description, syntax and parsing, semantics, opinion analysis, natural language processing applications, speech production and phonetics, speech resources, speech processing and applications.




Increasing Naturalness and Flexibility in Spoken Dialogue Interaction


Book Description

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.




9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology


Book Description

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.