A Development Tool for Spoken Dialogue Systems and Its Evaluation

Recently the technology for speech recognition and language processing has been improved, and speech recognition systems and dialogue systems have been developed to be practical use. However, in order to become practical, not only those fundamental techniques but also the techniques of portability and expansibility should be developed. We have also done the research on usability and robustness until now, but we have not yet done the research on expansibility and portability. The purpose of this paper is to improve the efficiency of the system construction, focusing on portability of spoken dialogue system, by dividing the part with the task independent and dependent of the system clearly. Applying the system to two tasks of sightseeing guidance and literature retrieval, we evaluated the efficiency of the system construction. We obtained the performance which was equivalent to previous task-dependent system not considering the portability on the sightseeing guidance task.