Languages for the Annotation and Specification of Dialogues

Gregor Erbach
Berlin, Saarbrücken, Wien
gor@acm.org

course website: http://purl.org/net/gor/esslli01/

ESSLLI 01 Presentation

Schedule

Unit 1: Introduction to Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS)
Unit 2: Linguistic Resources in SDS
Unit 3: Developing Spoken Dialogue Applications
Unit 4: Dialogue Annotation, Annotation Graphs
Unit 5: Excursion: Introduction to XML
Unit 6: XML-based Annotation Frameworks (MATE)
Unit 7: Evaluation of SDS
Unit 8: Dialogue Specification Languages
Unit 9: VoiceXML
Unit 10: Challenges

Readings

Day 1: none
Day 2: A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation (Annotation Graphs)
Day 3: Introduction to the HCRC Map Task Corpus
An XML Architecture for the HCRC Map Task Corpus.
Day 4: PARADISE: A Framework for Evaluating Spoken Dialogue Agents
Day 5: VoiceXML 1.0 specification

Links

Organisations

SigDIAL
VoiceXML Forum

Companies

Philips
Nuance Developer Network
Speechworks

Projects

ATLAS: Architecture and Tools for Linguistic Analysis Systems
DISC Spoken Language Dialogue Systems and Components: Best practice in development and evaluation
MATE: Multilevel Annotation Tools Engineering
ISLE: International Standards for Language Engineering
SPEECHDAT
TRINDI: Task-oriented Instructional Dialogue

Tools

Annotation Graphs: Software and Resources for Annotation Graphs
CSLU toolkit: includes a speech recogniser, dialogue development toolkit, and an animated talking head
XML tools from Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
MATE workbench: Multilevel Annotation workbench
IBM Voice Server SDK: VoiceXML interpreter and ViaVoice speech recogniser
BeVocal Developer's Cafe: VoiceXML development kit
Tellme Studio: VoiceXML development kit
TRINDIKIT: toolkit for building and experimenting with dialogue move engines and information states

Resources

Tutorial Spoken Dialogue Systems by Bob Carpenter and Jennifer Chu-Carroll, ACL 1999
Linguistic Data Consortium
European Language Resources Association
comp.speech Frequently Asked Questions
Map Task Corpus
SigDIAL resources

Chatbots

Botspot (features one section on chatbots)

Deployed Spoken Dialogue Systems

German Rail (German, DASA)                  +49 180-5 996622

German Rail (German, Philips)               +49 241 60 40 20

Cinema Programmes (German, Sympalog)        +49 9131-6166116

Swedish Rail (Swedish, Philips)             +46 8 6967540

London Restaurant Guide (English, Philips)  +44 1206 751363

German stock quotes (German, Speechworks)   +44 1784 898 392

French stock quotes (French, Speechworks)   +44 1784 898 637

English stock quotes (English, Speechworks) +44 1784 898 398

CU Communicator (English, Colorado Uni)     +1  303 735 5189

Selected Bibliography

Anderson, A., Bader, M., Bard, E., Boyle, E., Doherty, G. M., Garrod, S., Isard, S., Kowtko, J., McAllister, J., Miller, J., Sotillo, C., Thompson, H. S. and Weinert, R. The HCRC Map Task Corpus. Language and Speech, 34, pp. 351-366 (1991)

Androutsopoulos, Ion and Aretoulaki, Maria. Natural Language Interaction - Natural Language Interfaces and Spoken Dialog Systems. In: R. Mitkov (ed.) Handbook of Computational Linguistics, Oxford University Press (to appear)

Aust, H., Oerder, M., Seide, F., and Steinbiss, V. The Philips automatic train timetable information system. Speech Communication 17, 249-262 (1995)

Balentine, B., Morgan D. P. How to build a speech recognition application. Enterprise Integration Group (1999)

Bernsen, N.O., Dybkjær, H. and Dybkjær, H. Designing Interactive Speech Systems: From First Ideas to User Testing. Springer (1998)

Bird, Steven and Liberman, Mark. A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation. Speech Communication 33(1,2), pp 23-60 (2001)

Cole et al. (eds.) Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology. Cambridge University Press (1996)

Dybkjær, L. and Bernsen, N.O. The MATE Workbench. LREC 2000 Workshop, Athens (2000)

Erbach, G. Sprachdialogsysteme für Telefondienste - Stand der Technik und zukünftige Entwicklungen In: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the International Association Language and Business, Köln (2000)

Gibbon, D., Mertins, I., Moore, R.K. (eds.) Handbook of multimodal and spoken dialogue systems. Kluwer (2000)

Gibbon, D., Moore, R., and Winski, R. Handbook of Standards and Resources for Spoken Language Systems. De Gruyter (1997)

Ide, Nance. The XML Framework and Its Implications for Corpus Access and Use. LREC 2000 Workshop, Athens (2000)

Isard, A. (2001). An XML Architecture for the HCRC Map Task Corpus. In P. Kuehnlein, H. Rieser, H. Zeevat, eds, Bi-Dialog 2001.

Lopez, P. and Romary, L. A Framework for Multilevel linguistic Annotations. LREC 2000 Workshop, Athens (2000)

McTear, Michael F. Spoken Dialogue Technology: Enabling the Conversational User Interface. ACM Computing Surveys (submitted)

O'Shaughnessy, Douglas. Speech Communications: Human and Machine IEEE Press (1999)

Rubin, Jeffrey. Handbook of Usability Testing. Wiley (1994)

VoiceXML 1.0 specification, VoiceXML Forum (2000)

Wahlster Wolfgang (ed). Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-To-Speech Translation. Springer (2000)