LIESHOU : A Mandarin Conversational Task Agent for the Galaxy-II Architecture

Multilinguality is an important component of spoken dialogue systems, both because it makes the systems available to a wider audience and because it leads to a more flexible system dialogue strategy. This thesis concerns the development of a Chinese language capability for the ORION system, which is one of many spoken dialogue systems available within the GALAXY-II architecture. This new system, which we call LIESHOU, interacts with Mandarin-speaking users and performs off-line tasks, initiating later contact with a user at a pre-negotiated time. The development and design of LIESHOU closely followed the design of similar multilingual GALAXY-II domains, such as MUXING (Chinese JUPITER), and PHRASEBOOK (Translation Guide for Foreign Travelers). The successful deployment of LIESHOU required the design and implementation of four main components speech recognition, natural language understanding, language generation, and speech synthesis. These four components were implemented using the SUMMIT speech recognition system, TINA Natural Language understanding system, GENESIS-II language generation system, and ENVOICE speech synthesis system respectively. The development of the necessary resources for each of these components is described in detail, and a system evaluation is given for the final implementation. Thesis Supervisor: Stephanie Seneff Title: Principal Research Scientist