INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Dialog Methods for Improved Alphanumeric String Capture

Doug Peters, Peter Stubley

Nuance Communications, Canada

In this paper, we consider advances in automated over-the-phone alphanumeric string capture. For this task, acoustic confusions typically result in significant error rates. Of course, confusions also exist in human-to-human communication. However, humans employ dialog-level strategies with which to disambiguate confusions and correct errors - allowing high-fidelity transmission of alphanumeric strings across all but the noisiest of channels. These human strategies are examined and a subset amenable to automation is identified. The resulting automated error-correction dialog achieves 30% dialog error rate reduction compared to a conventional application in a high-volume commercial deployment. Further, the fact that there are many recognition errors in the context of a structurally simple dialog recommends this task for dialog optimization. We present an example of offline optimization and discuss the potential for online learning.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Peters, Doug / Stubley, Peter (2011): "Dialog methods for improved alphanumeric string capture", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 1017-1020.