Web engineering meets natural language processing: a vocal interface generation practice

Today's trend towards ever more compact devices such as PDAs and mobile phones demands a more pervasive access manner. This paper describes an innovative mediator service architecture based on up-to-date web engineering standards to enable voice-based access to Web applications by means of voice portals and VoiceXML technologies. The core of the architecture is a Natural Language Generator that implements a pipeline of transformation rules. We show how Natural Language Generation technology can improve profitability of web applications by supporting scalable, automated generation of highly customized spoken dialogue-driven interfaces.

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