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Information and
Communication Technology Department |
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Tutorial: Standards, Tools and Architectures for Natural Language Spoken
Dialogue Systems A scalable approach to speech applications Giuseppe Di
Fabbrizio (AT&T Labs - Research) 7-8 September 2006- Povo – |
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Tutorial Chair Registration Limited seats available. Need to Register and send email
to: HLT06-unitn@dit.unitn.it |
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This tutorial is organized by the Adaptive
Multimodal Interface Lab (Department of Information and Communication
Technology, “Technology and Architecture
for Spoken Dialog Technology”. |
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Thursday, September 7th,
2006 – Room 105 9:30 am – 12:30 pm Lecture 1 2:30 pm – 4:30 pm Lab 1 Advanced Speech Technology
Series Tutorial (Part
I) Friday, September 8th,
2006 – Room 105 9:30 am – 12:30 pm Lecture 2 2:30 pm – 4:30 pm Lab 2 Advanced Speech Technology
Series Tutorial (Part
II) |
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Spoken Dialogue Systems
(SDS) have been receiving a great deal of attention
from the research community and the industry. SDS allow
individuals to interact with computer systems using spoken natural language
in order to perform specific tasks as they would with human agents. Examples
of interactions include tasks such as retrieving information about sports,
weather, news, stock quotes (voice
portal). More challenging systems, like automated customer care and help
desks, endeavor to automatically fulfill customer transactions that are
typically achieved through human agents. The promise of automating
human-operated services is an attractive proposition for enterprises that are
dealing with crowds of customers daily flocking at call centers tool free
numbers. However, the recent widespread adoption of W3C standards in the
speech industry fostered the notion that ‘well-established’ web authoring
approaches would easily apply to speech-enabled applications. But properly capturing the user intentions
and successfully orchestrate a human-machine dialogue is nor easy or a
scalable task with current standards alone. Part of the challenge is the
integration of interdisciplinary techniques in a general and flexible development
framework. For example, current state-of-the-art SDS research relies on the
several advanced components, such as automatic speech recognizer (ASR),
natural language understanding (NLU), text to speech (TTS), natural language
generation (NLG), dialogue management (DM), and general database backend
access. Each of these components is typically tightly integrated into a
telephony platform that offers the execution environment and the needed
interfaces to the public switched telephony network (PSTN). Current speech
standards only address part of the authoring task, while the general design,
the NLU, and language modeling required by a modern conversational system are
still art rather than science. This tutorial seeks to
educate speech researchers and practitioners to overcome those limitations.
It will introduce general speech design principles, standards, tools,
architectures, and protocols in a coherent environment driven by the latest
advances in the research forefront and industry trends. Based upon the lesson
learned on large natural language speech application deployments, this class
will recast the task of designing and implement speech–enabled services in a
flexible and scalable way. The tutorial is divided in four modules organized
in two morning lectures and two afternoon hands-on projects with practical
assignments. The tutorial and the teaching material are in
English. |
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Lecture 1
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Lecture 2
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Lab 1
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Lab 2
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