ESCA Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Vigsø, Denmark May 30 - June 2, 1995

The Danish Spoken Language Dialogue Project - A General Overview

Anders Baekgaard (1), Niels Ole Bernsen (2), T. Brøndsted (1), Paul Dalsgaard (1), Hans Dybkjær (2), Laila Dybkjær (2), J. Kristiansen (1), Lars Bo Larsen (1), Børge Lindberg (1), B. Maegaard (3), B. Music (3), L. Offersgaard (3), C. Povlsen (3)

(1) Center for PersonKommunikation (CPK), Aalborg University, Denmark
(2) Centre for Cognitive Science (CCS), Roskilde University, Denmark
(3) Centre for Language Technology (CST), University of Copenhagen, Denmark

This paper describes work being performed on a national Danish collaborative project. The project aims at establishing prototype demonstrators which integrate results from interdisciplinary research covering spoken language processing, natural language parsing and human-computer interfacing and dialogue engineering. The prototype demonstrator being established handles the task of booking domestic flight tickets. The prototype is built on the basis of a platform for dialogue design, specification and management during execution. The platform enables easy interfacing to a number of input and output devices and one or more applications. System input is from a continuous speech recogniser connected via a telephone interface, output is created by the concatenation of samples of prerecorded speech, and the applicational information - e.g. availability of the tickets - is stored in a database. To prepare the prototype, the user-application interactions have been analysed in a set of Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) tests. These have resulted in an initial dialogue model for the given application which is mainly system controlled. A dedicated natural language parser has been established to parse input from the speech recogniser and a domain sublanguage model has been implemented in the format of a set of Augmented Phrase Structure Grammars (APSG's). The present prototype can execute on a PC running the Linux operating system and on a SUN workstation running Solaris. In the next prototype generation focus is given to extended services within the ticket reservation system together with more natural human-computer interaction via mixed initiative dialogues.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Baekgaard, Anders / Bernsen, Niels Ole / Brøndsted, T. / Dalsgaard, Paul / Dybkjær, Hans / Dybkjær, Laila / Kristiansen, J. / Larsen, Lars Bo / Lindberg, Børge / Maegaard, B. / Music, B. / Offersgaard, L. / Povlsen, C. (1995): "The danish spoken language dialogue project - a general overview", In SDS-1995, 89-92.