EUROSPEECH '91 Second European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Genova, Italy September 24-26, 1991

The MIT ATIS System; Preliminary Development, Spontaneous Speech Data Collection, and Performance Evaluation

Victor W. Zue, James Glass, David Goodine, Lynette Hirschman, Hong C. Leung, Michael Phillips, Joseph Polifroni, Stephanie Seneff

Spoken Language Systems Group, Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

This paper describes the MIT ATIS system, with particular emphasis on the discourse and dialogue models and the consequences for data collection. The ATIS system provides air travel information and can simulate the booking of a flight, using a mixed-initiative dialogue framework. An intermediate semantic frame representation serves as the focal point for all back-end operations, and the discourse model includes the resolution of explicit anaphoric references and indirect and direct references to information mentioned earlier in the conversation. We have collected over 4500 utterances from subjects using the system to solve simulated booking scenarios. We have studied these dialogues, and have used them productively to guide the development of better discourse and dialogue models. We have also tabulated some interesting differences between our data and those collected at Texas Instruments using a very different paradigm.

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Bibliographic reference.  Zue, Victor W. / Glass, James / Goodine, David / Hirschman, Lynette / Leung, Hong C. / Phillips, Michael / Polifroni, Joseph / Seneff, Stephanie (1991): "The MIT ATIS system; preliminary development, spontaneous speech data collection, and performance evaluation", In EUROSPEECH-1991, 537-540.