VPQ (Voice Post Query) is a dialog system for spoken access to information in the AT&T personnel database (>120,000 entries). An explicit design goal is for the initial interaction with the system to be rather unconstrained and to rely on tighter, prompt-constrained, dialog only when absolutely necessary. The purpose of VPQ is to explore and exploit the capabilities of ``state-of-the-art'' speech recognition systems for this high-perplexity task, and to develop the natural language understanding and dialog control components necessary for effective and efficient user interactions. The VPQ task includes simple interactions, where the initial request is unambiguous and the system's response provides the desired information or completes a call to the requested person, as well as more complex interactions where ambiguities or errors require dialog-driven resolution. This paper highlights the inherent challenges in this task, the major components of the system, the rationale for their design, and how they perform.
Cite as: Buntschuh, B., Kamm, C.A., Fabbrizio, G.D., Abella, A., Mohri, M., Narayanan, S., Zeljkovic, I., Sharp, R.D., Wright, J.H., Marcus, S., Shaffer, J., Duncan, R., Wilpon, J.G. (1998) VPQ: a spoken language interface to large scale directory information. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 0877, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-707
@inproceedings{buntschuh98_icslp,
author={Bruce Buntschuh and Candace A. Kamm and Giuseppe Di Fabbrizio and Alicia Abella and Mehryar Mohri and Shrikanth Narayanan and I. Zeljkovic and R.D. Sharp and Jeremy H. Wright and S. Marcus and J. Shaffer and R. Duncan and J.G. Wilpon},
title={{VPQ: a spoken language interface to large scale directory information}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 0877},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-707}
}