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ESCA Workshop on Spoken Dialogue SystemsVigsų, Denmark |
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ESCA Workshop on Spoken Dialogue SystemsVigsų, Denmark |
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A method has been developed for the generation of speech reply in a dialogue system on weather conditions designed to support patrolmen for electric facilities. Upon a request from the user, the system makes an access to the database on weather information and generates am appropriate answer as the speech reply. It also makes an advice to the user on his jobs, and generates speech outputs for alarms and warnings when they are issued. In the process of generating a semantic representation for the response content, the method assigns a flag to each filler of case element based on the new/old judgment in the dialogue flow. This flag serves as the index for the inclusion of the case element into the surface sentence and also as that for the control of emphasis in speech synthesis. Thus the developed method can generate speech reply with proper elliptical expressions and prosodic emphases so that it is easily understood by the user. Although speech synthesis was conducted using the synthesizer previously developed for the text-to-speech conversion, its prosodic rules were slightly modified so that the synthesized speech sounded natural as the speech reply of the dialogue system. Propriety of the method was shown by a preliminary experiment on the response sentence generation.
Bibliographic reference. Hirose, Keikichi / Senoo, Toru (1995): "A method of generating speech reply with elliptical expressions and prosodic emphases", In SDS-1995, 233-236.