Abstract
In this work we report our efforts to facilitate the creation of mixed-initiative conversational interfaces for novice and experienced developers of human language technology. Our focus has been on a framework that allows developers to easily specify the basic concepts of their applications, and rapidly prototype conversational interfaces for a variety of configurations. In this paper we describe the current knowledge representation, the compilation processes for speech understanding, generation, and dialogue turn management, as well as the user interfaces created for novice users and more experienced developers. Finally, we report our experiences with several user groups in which developers used this framework to prototype a variety of conversational interfaces.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen, J., Schubert, L., Ferguson, G., Heeman, P., Hwang, C.H., Kato, T., Light, M., Martin, N., Miller, B., Poesio, M., and Traum, D., The TRAINS Project: A Case Study in Defining a Conversational Planning Agent, Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 7, 1995, pp. 7–48.
Baptist, L. and S. Seneff, GENESIS-II: A Versatile System for Language Generation in Conversational System Applications, Proceedings of International Conference on Spoken Language Processing 2000 ICSLP’2000 (Beijing, 16–20 October 2000), Vol. 3, ISCA Archive, 2000, pp. 271–274.
Barnard, E., Halberstadt, A., Kotelly, C., and Phillips, M., A Consistent Approach to Designing Spoken-Dialog Systems, in Proceedings of Workshop ASRU’99 (Keystone, 13–15 December 1999), accessible at http://asru99.research.att.com/abstracts/6_4490_invited.html
Bazzi, I. and Glass, J., Modeling Out-Of-Vocabulary Words for Robust Speech Recognition, in Proceedings of International Conference on Spoken Language Processing 2000 ICSLP’2000 (Beijing, 16–20 October 2000), ISCA Archive, 2000, pp. 401–404.
Billi, R., Canavesio, F., and Rullent, C., Automation of Telecom Italia Directory Assistance Service: Field Trial Results, in Proceedings of 4th IEEE Workshop on Interactive Voice Technology for Telecommunications Applications IVTTA’98 (Turin, 29–30 September 1998), IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, 1998, pp. 11–16.
Black, A., Lenzo, K., and Pagel, V., Issues in Building General Letter to Sound Rules, in Proceedings of 3rd ESCA/COSCOSDA International Workshop on Speech Synthesis (Jenolan Caves, 26–29 November 1998), 1998.
Blomberg, M., Carlson, R., Elenius, K., Granström, B., Gustafson, J., Hunnicutt, S., Lindell, R., Neovius, L., and Nord, L., An Experimental Dialogue System: Waxholm, in Proceedings of European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Eurospeech’93 (Berlin, September 1993), ISCA Archive, 1993, pp. 1867–1870.
Derthick, M. ans Roth, S., Example-Based Generation of Custom Data Analysis Applications, in Proceedings of 6th ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces IUI’2001 (Santa Fe, 14–17 January 2001), ACM Press, New York, 2001, pp. 57–64.
Filisko, E. and Seneff, S., A Context Resolution Server For The GALAXY Conversational Systems, in Proceedings of 8th European Conf. on Speech Communication and Technology Eurospeech’2003 (Geneva, 1–4 Sept. 2003), ISCA Archive, 2003, pp. 197–200.
Glass, J. and Weinstein, E., Speechbuilder: Facilitating Spoken Dialogue Systems Development, in Proceedings of 7th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Eurospeech’2001 (Aalborg, 3–7 September 2001), ISCA Archive, 2001, pp. 1335–1338, accessible at http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu/sls/publications/2001/Speech Builder.pdf
Glass, J., A Probabilistic Framework for Segment-Based Speech Recognition, Computer, Speech, and Language, Vol. 17, 2003, pp. 137–152.
Gorin, A., Riccardi, G., and Wright, J., How may I help you?, Speech Communication, Vol. 23, 1997, pp. 113–127.
Microsoft SQL Server: English Query, October 2000, accessible at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/evaluation/features/english.asp
MIT Project Oxygen web site, accessible at http://oxygen.lcs.mit.edu
Nakano, M. and Hazen, T., Using Untranscribed User Utterances for Improving Language Models Based On Confidence Scoring, in Proceedings of 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Eurospeech’2003 (Geneva, 1–4 September 2003), ISCA Archive, 2003, pp. 417–420.
Nuance Communications, http://www.nuance.com
Polifroni, J. and Chung, G., Promoting Portability in Dialogue Management, in Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processsing ICSLP’2002 (Denver, 16–20 September 2002), ISCA Archive, 2002, pp. 2721–2724.
Polifroni, J., Chung, G., and Seneff, S., Towards the Automatic Generation of Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Systems From Web Content, in Proceedings of 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Eurospeech’2003 (Geneva, 1–4 September 2003), ISCA Archive, 2003, pp. 193–196.
Popescu, A.M., Etzioni, O., and Kautz, H., Towards a Theory of Natural Language Interfaces to Databases, in Proceedings of ACM Int. Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (Miami, 12–15 January 2003), ACM Press, New York, 2003, pp. 149–157.
Rosset, S., Bennacef, S., and Lamel, L., Design Strategies for Spoken Language Dialog Systems, in Proc. of 6th European Conf. on Speech Communication and Technology Eurospeech’99 (Budapest, 5–9 September 1999), ISCA Archive, 1999, pp. 1535–1538.
Rudnicky, A.I., Thayer, E., Constantinides, P., Tchou, C., Shem, R., Lenzo, K., Xu W., and Oh, A., Creating natural dialogs in the Carnegie Mellon Communicator system, in Proc. of 6th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Eurospeech’99 (Budapest, 5–9 September 1999), ISCA Archive, 1999, pp. 1531–1534, accessible at http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/Communicator/papers/NaturalDialogs2.pdf
Schalkwyk, J., Hetherington, L., and Story, E., Speech Recognition With Dynamic Grammars Using Finite-State Transducers, in Proceedings of 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Eurospeech’2003 (Geneva, 1–4 September 2003), ISCA Archive, 2003, pp. 1969–1972.
Seneff, S. and Polifroni, J., Dialogue Management in the MERCURY Flight Reservation System, in Proceedings of ANLP-NAACL Satellite Workshop on Conversational Systems (Seattle, 4 May 2000).
Seneff, S., Hurley, E., Lau, R., Pao, C., Schmid, P., and Zue, V., GALAXY-II: A Reference Architecture for Conversational System Development, in R.H. Mannell, J. Robert-Ribes (eds.), Proceedings of 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processsing ICSLP’98 (Sydney, 30 November–4 December 1998), Vol. 3, Australian Speech Science and Technology Association, Incorporated (ASSTA), Canberra, 1998, pp. 931–934, accessible at http://www.sls.csail.mit.edu/sls/publications/1998/icslp98-galaxy.pdf
Seneff, S., Tina: A Natural Language System for Spoken Language Applications, Computational Linguistics, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1992, pp. 61–86.
Seneff, S., Wang, Ch., Hazen, T.J., Automatic Induction of N-Gram Language Models from a Natural Language Grammar, in Proceedings of 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Eurospeech’2003 (Geneva, 1–4 September 2003), ISCA Archive, 2003, pp. 641–644.
Souvignier, V., Kellner, A., Rueber, B., Schramm, H., and Seide, F., The Thoughtful Elephant: Strategies for Spoken Dialogue Systems, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2000, pp. 51–62.
Starkie, B., Findlow, G., Ho, K., Hui, A., Law, L., Lightwood, L., Michnowicz, S., and Walder, Ch., Lyrebird: Developing Spoken Dialog Systems Using Examples, in Proceedings of 6th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference ICGI’02 (Amsterdam, 23–25 September 2002), Amsterdam, 2002, pp. 309–311.
Steele, K., Waterman, J., and Weinstein, E., The Oxygen H21 Handheld, MIT Lab. for Computer Science Research Summary, March 2003.
Sutton, S., Universal Speech Tools: The CSLU Toolkit, in R.H. Mannell, J. Robert-Ribes (eds.), Proceedings of 5th Int. Conf. on Spoken Language Processsing ICSLP’98 (Sydney, 30 November–4 December 1998), Vol. 3, Australian Speech Science and Technology Association, Incorporated (ASSTA), Canberra, 1998, pp. 3221–3224.
Toth, A., Towards Every-Citizen’s Speech Interface: An Application Generator for Speech Interfaces to Databases, in Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processsing ICSLP’2002 (Denver, 16–20 September 2002), ISCA Archive, 2002, pp. 1497–1500.
VoiceXML, accessible at http://www.w3.org/TR/voicexml/
Zue, V. and Glass, J., Conversational interfaces: Advances and challenges, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 88, No. 8, 2000, pp. 1166–1180.
Zue, V., Seneff, S., Glass, J., Polifroni, J., Pao, C., Hazen, T., and Hetherington, L., JUPITER: A Telephone-Based Conversational Interface for Weather Information, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2000, pp. 85–96.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Kluwer Academic Publishers
About this paper
Cite this paper
Glass, J., Weinstein, E., Cyphers, S., Polifroni, J., Chung, G., Nakano, M. (2005). A Framework for Developing Conversational User Interfaces. In: Jacob, R.J., Limbourg, Q., Vanderdonckt, J. (eds) Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces IV. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3304-4_28
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3304-4_28
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-3145-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-3304-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)