Contextual Information and Specific Language Models for Spoken Language Understanding

In this paper we explain how contextual expectations are generated and used in the task-oriented spoken language understanding system Dialogos. The hard task of recognizing spontaneous speech on the telephone may greatly benefit from the use of specific language models during the recognition of callers' utterances. By 'specific language models' we mean a set of language models that are trained on contextually appropriated data, and that are used during different states of the dialogue on the basis of the information sent to the acoustic level by the dialogue management module. In this paper we describe how the specific language models are obtained on the basis of contextual information. The experimental result we report show that recognition and understanding performance are improved thanks to the use of specific language models.

[1]  Philippe Bretier,et al.  A Rational Agent as the Kernel of a Cooperative Spoken Dialogue System: Implementing a Logical Theory of Interaction , 1996, ATAL.

[2]  Wayne H. Ward,et al.  Recent Improvements in the CMU Spoken Language Understanding System , 1994, HLT.

[3]  Egidio P. Giachin,et al.  Automatic clustering of words for probabilistic language models , 1995, EUROSPEECH.

[4]  Roberto Billi,et al.  Field trial evaluations of two different information inquiry systems , 1996, Proceedings of IVTTA '96. Workshop on Interactive Voice Technology for Telecommunications Applications.

[5]  Marilyn A. Walker,et al.  Evaluating competing agent strategies for a voice email agent , 1997, EUROSPEECH.

[6]  Morena Danieli,et al.  On the use of expectations for detecting and repairing human-machine miscommunication , 1997, AAAI 1996.

[7]  J. Potjer,et al.  Subjective and objective evaluation of two types of dialogues in a call assistance service , 1996, Proceedings of IVTTA '96. Workshop on Interactive Voice Technology for Telecommunications Applications.

[8]  Heinrich Niemann,et al.  Combining stochastic and linguistic language models for recognition of spontaneous speech , 1996, 1996 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Conference Proceedings.

[9]  David R. Traum,et al.  Book Reviews: Spoken Natural Language Dialogue Systems: A Practical Approach , 1996, CL.

[10]  Paolo Baggia,et al.  Language modelling for task-oriented domains , 1997, EUROSPEECH.

[11]  Morena Danieli,et al.  Metrics for Evaluating Dialogue Strategies in a Spoken Language System , 1996, ArXiv.

[12]  Morena Danieli,et al.  A robust system for human-machine dialogue in telephony-based applications , 1997, Int. J. Speech Technol..

[13]  Paolo Baggia,et al.  Specialized language models using dialogue predictions , 1996, 1997 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.