“LentInfo” Information—Providing System for the Festival Lent Programme

This paper presents an application, “LentInfo”, which is a system used to provide information about programmes for the Festival Lent in Slovenia. The Festival Lent consists of different open-air theatre and music performances and raws more than 400,000 visitors per year. This application is based on a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) speech recogniser, and the dialogue construction and management is done using the CSDP (Common Spoken Dialogue Platform) dialogue management system. It is represented as a finite-state structure. The dialogue can be specified in a script using simple syntax description. The dialogue manager is multi-application oriented, so it can easily be upgraded for new applications. If some new concepts are needed, only new actions need be added to the existing ones. Currently, prompt messages are prerecorded, but it is also possible to include a speech synthesis system depending on the needs of the application. Error recovery during the dialogue is done with user confirmation of the recognised input speech. The results are presented for tests performed in the year 2001. The results are analyzed according to the phone type (fixed/mobile), signal to noise ratio, dialogue path, etc. Although some calls where carried out using mobile phones from noisy festival places, the performance of the system decreased only slightly under these conditions.

[1]  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.

[2]  S. Young.  Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition : a ReviewSteve , 1996 .

[3]  Vishwa Gupta,et al.  Automation of locality recognition in ADAS Plus , 1998, Proceedings 1998 IEEE 4th Workshop Interactive Voice Technology for Telecommunications Applications. IVTTA '98 (Cat. No.98TH8376).

[4]  Erwin Marschall,et al.  METHODS FOR IMPROVED SPEECH RECOGNITION OVER TELEPHONE LINES , 1995, 1995 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[5]  Ismael Cortázar,et al.  Current and experimental applications of speech technology for telecom services in Europe , 1997, Speech Commun..

[6]  Narada D. Warakagoda,et al.  A Noise Robust Multilingual Reference Recogniser Based on Speechdat(II) , 2000, INTERSPEECH.

[7]  Steve Young,et al.  The HTK book , 1995 .

[8]  Narada D. Warakagoda,et al.  The COST 249 SpeechDat Multilingual Reference Recogniser , 2000, LREC.

[9]  Richard Winski,et al.  European speech databases for telephone applications , 1997, 1997 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[10]  Lou Boves,et al.  Annotation in the SpeechDat Projects , 2001, Int. J. Speech Technol..

[11]  Andrej Zgank,et al.  Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognizer for Slovenian Language , 2001, TSD.

[12]  William J. Byrne,et al.  Morpheme Based Language Models for Speech Recognition of Czech , 2000, TSD.

[13]  Bernhard Kaspar,et al.  Barge-in revised , 1997, EUROSPEECH.

[14]  Hermann Ney,et al.  A word graph algorithm for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition , 1994, Comput. Speech Lang..

[15]  Christophe Beaugeant,et al.  Recognition performance of the siemens front-end with and without frame dropping on the Aurora 2 database , 2001, INTERSPEECH.

[16]  Andrej Zgank,et al.  Preliminary Evaluation of Slovenian Mobile Database PoliDat , 2002, LREC.

[17]  Bogomir Horvat,et al.  Subband echo cancellation in automatic speech dialog systems , 1997, EUROSPEECH.