Error Handling in Spoken Dialogue Systems August 28-31, 2003 Château d'Oex, Vaud, Switzerland

Interaction Modeling in the SmartKom System

Thomas Portele

Philips Research Aachen, Germany

The research project SmartKom aims at developing sophisticated multimodal user interfaces. The main outcome of the project is an integrated demonstrator combining all research results. One component of this demonstrator is the interaction module that constructs and maintains a model of human-computer interaction. The interaction module uses a set of input sources (about 50 in total) to calculate several values, each describing a very specific aspect. These values (indicators) are combined to construct more general values (models). The model values are then passed on to other SmartKom modules that can exploit them to improve the interaction. Problematic situations are expressed by threemodels in the fourth part of the module. One model describes the likelihood that the user is angry by combining scores from mimic analysis, emotion extraction from prosody, and use of certain words. A secondmodel combines confidence values from recognizers and similar scores from other modules to detect problems in the analysis part of the system. A third model estimates the dialogue progress using the ratio of new information items to total information items and the overall number of information items in the user input.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Portele, Thomas (2003): "Interaction modeling in the SmartKom system", In EHSD-2003, 89-94.