7.995, Confs: Dialogue Processing in Spoken Language Systems

The Linguist List linguist at tam2000.tamu.edu
Mon Jul 8 02:36:04 UTC 1996


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List:  Vol-7-995. Sun Jul 7 1996. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines:  265
 
Subject: 7.995, Confs: Dialogue Processing in Spoken Language Systems
 
Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. <aristar at tam2000.tamu.edu>
            Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at emunix.emich.edu> (On Leave)
            T. Daniel Seely: Eastern Michigan U. <dseely at emunix.emich.edu>
 
Associate Editor:  Ljuba Veselinova <lveselin at emunix.emich.edu>
Assistant Editors: Ron Reck <rreck at emunix.emich.edu>
                   Ann Dizdar <dizdar at tam2000.tamu.edu>
                   Annemarie Valdez <avaldez at emunix.emich.edu>
 
Software development: John H. Remmers <remmers at emunix.emich.edu>
 
Editor for this issue: lveselin at emunix.emich.edu (Ljuba Veselinova)
 
We'd appreciate your limiting conference announcements to 150 lines,
so that we can post more than 1 per issue.  Please consider omitting
information useful only to attendees, such as information on housing,
transportation, or rooms and times of sessions.  Please do not use
abbreviations or acronyms for your conference unless you explain
them in your text.  Many people outside your area of specialization
will not recognize them.   Thank you for your cooperation.
 
---------------------------------Directory-----------------------------------
1)
Date:  Sun, 07 Jul 1996 16:30:55 +0200
From:  Elisabeth.Maier at dfki.uni-sb.de (Elisabeth Maier)
Subject:  CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: ECAI-96 Workshop on Dialogue Processing in Sp
oken Language Systems
 
---------------------------------Messages------------------------------------
1)
Date:  Sun, 07 Jul 1996 16:30:55 +0200
From:  Elisabeth.Maier at dfki.uni-sb.de (Elisabeth Maier)
Subject:  CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: ECAI-96 Workshop on Dialogue Processing in Sp
oken Language Systems
 
 
*********************** CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ***********************
 
 
			 ECAI-96 Workshop on
 
  		DIALOGUE PROCESSING IN SPOKEN LANGUAGE
                             SYSTEMS
 
                 Budapest, Hungary, August 13, 1996
 
INTRODUCTION
 
The  development of  dialogue components for  interactive systems that
employ speech as input and/or output modality has to take into account
problems that are specific for the treatment of spoken language. Among
these problems are the following:
 
Segmentation of dialogue contributions into basic units
 
While for dialogue systems  that cope with  written / typed language a
sentence can serve as basic  unit for dialogue modeling, this approach
cannot be applied for the treatment of spontaneous speech or even read
speech, where phrasing    of sentences may   differ from   speaker  to
speaker. Spoken input  is  often  incomplete, incorrect and   contains
interruptions   and   repairs;  full  sentences     occur  only   very
occassionaly.  Therefore,  new  basic  units for the    development of
dialogue models  have    to be  proposed  in order   to also   capture
fragmentary input.
 
Related to this  problem is the determination  of the boundaries  that
exist   between the various  dialogue   units in longer single-speaker
dialogue   turns.  While   for   written  language    punctuation  and
paragraphing serve as   indicator for segmentation, reliable  cues for
the segmentation of spoken language still have to be determined.
 
It  can be expected  that  dialogue models that   build on such  a new
notion of  basic dialogue   units differ significantly   from dialogue
models that treat only  written language. A contrastive examination of
the differences between dialogue  models that treat spoken and written
dialogue contributions is a point of future research.
 
Interaction of prosody and dialogue processing
 
For some of the above-mentioned   issues the consideration of  prosody
can contribute to a solution of the problems. Prosody can perform many
functions such as  chunking   turns into  smaller   units, emphasizing
important information, indicating discontinuities (e.g. interruptions,
corrections), expressing intention  and emotion. Therefore  components
which  make   prosodic information accessible  to  dialogue processing
become more and more important.
 
Robustness
 
Robustness  of all components is an  important issue in the design and
the development of spoken language  systems. With respect to  dialogue
components robustness is related to the following topics:
 
- recognition errors and missing information
- unexpected input
- clarification
- disfluencies
 
Evaluation
 
So far the evaluation of spoken language  systems has been focusing on
the quality  of  the speech components.  Evaluation  criteria  for the
dialogue components of such systems are still to be developed.
 
A careful evaluation can  contribute to the  improvement of the system
with  respect to  what  a user expects  from  the machine and  how she
adjusts to its abilities.  Therefore criteria like user acceptance and
user satisfaction have to be taken into account.
 
These topics  are addressed by papers  presented in the course of this
workshop.
 
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
 
Elisabeth Maier
DFKI GmbH
maier at dfki.uni-sb.de
 
 
Marion Mast
IBM Scientific Center
mast at heidelbg.ibm.com
 
Susann LuperFoy
MITRE
susann at azrael.mitre.org
 
 
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
 
Nick Campbell, ATR, Japan
Morena Danieli, CSELT, Italy
Norman Fraser, VOCALIS, UK
Julia Hirschberg, AT&T, USA
Susann LuperFoy, MITRE, USA
Elisabeth Maier, DFKI GmbH, Germany
Marion Mast, IBM Scientific Center, Germany
 
 
PRELIMINARY PROGRAM
 
09:00 - 09:15   Welcome
 
Session 1: Theoretical and Sociological Aspects of Spoken Dialogue
           System Design
 
09:15 - 09:45   Detlev Krause (University of Hamburg, Germany)
                Social Research in Context of Speech Systems.
                The Case of VERBMOBIL
 
09:45 - 10:15   David Traum (TECFA, Universite de Geneve, Switzerland)
                and Peter Heeman (University of Rochester, USA)
                Utterance Units in Spoken Dialogue
 
10:15 - 10:30   Summary and discussion
                (Rapporteur: Nils Dahlbaeck, Linkoeping University,
		Sweden)
 
10:30 - 11:00   Break
 
Session 2: Prosodic Aspects of Spoken Dialogue Processing
 
11:00 - 11:30   Bernd Tischer, (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet
                Muenchen, Germany)
                The syntax of Self-Corrections in Dialogues
 
11:30 - 12:00   Mark Seligman (Berkeley, USA), Junko Hosaka (University
                of Tuebingen, Germany), and Harald Singer (ATR, Japan)
                ``Pause Units'' and Analysis of Spontaneous Japanese
                Dialogues: Preliminary Studies
 
12:00 - 12:30   Brigitte Grote (FAW, Germany), Eli Hagen (Technical
                University of Darmstadt, Germany), Adelheit Stein
                (GMD-IPSI, Germany), and Elke Teich (University of the
                Saarland, Germany)
                A Generation Perspective on Speech Production in
                Dialogue
 
12:30 - 12:45   Summary and discussion
                (Rapporteur: N.N.)
 
12:45 - 14:00   Break
 
Session 3: Spoken Dialogue Systems - Design and Implementation
 
14:00 - 14:30   Alicia Abella, Michael K. Brown and Bruce Buntschuh
                (AT&T Research, USA)
                Development Principles for Dialog-Based Interfaces
 
14:30 - 15:00   Niels Ole Bernsen, Laila Dybkjaer and Hans Dybkjaer
                (Roskilde University, Denmark)
                User Errors in Spoken Human-Machine Dialogue
 
15:00 - 15:30   R.J. vanVark, J.P.M. de Vreught, L.J.M. Rothkranz
                (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
                Classification of Public Transport Information
                Dialogues Using an Information-Based Coding Scheme
 
15:30 - 15:45   Summary and discussion
                (Rapporteur: Jacques Siroux, ENSSAT and IUT,
		Lannion, France)
 
15:45 - 16:15   Break
 
Session 4: Evaluation of Systems/Algorithms
 
16:15 - 16:45   Donna Gates, Alon Lavie, Lori Levin, Alex Waibel,
                Marsal Gavalda, Laura Mayfield, Monika Woszczyna
                and Puming Zhan (CMU, USA and University of Karlsruhe,
                Germany)
                End-to-end Evaluation in JANUS: a Speech-to-speech
                Translation System
 
16:45 - 17:15   Masahiro Araki and Shuji Doshita (Kyoto University,
                Japan)
                Automatic Evaluation Environment for Spoken Dialogue
                Systems
 
17:15 - 17:45   Teresa Sikorski und James Allen (University of
                Rochester, USA)
                A Task-Based Evaluation of the TRAINS-95 Dialogue
                System
 
17:45 - 18:00   Summary and discussion
                (Rapporteur: Massimo Poesio, Edinburgh University, UK)
 
18:00 - 18:30   Final discussion and closing statements
 
 
PARTICIPATION
 
Since workshop attendance will  be   limited to maximally 40   people,
persons without  a paper  should contact the   organizers  as soon  as
possible.  Preference will be given to  people who present a paper, to
their co-authors and to persons  who submitted a paper. Other  persons
interested in attending are asked to provide a one-page description of
their background and of their interest in the workshop.
 
 
REGISTRATION
 
This  workshop     takes   place   directly     before the     general
ECAI-conference.  It is an ECAI policy  that workshop participation is
not    possible    without     registration    for     the     general
conference.  Registration  information  can   be  obtained   from  the
following address:
 
http://www.dfki.uni-sb.de/ecai96/registration/Registration.html
 
Workshop registration includes admission to the workshop, the workshop
notes and refreshments.    Note:  Individuals must  pay  the   ECAI-96
technical programme registration fee in  addition to the workshop  fee
of 50 ECU.
 
NOTE: Workshop information can also be obtained from
 
http://www.dfki.uni-sb.de/~maier/ecai.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-7-995.



More information about the LINGUIST mailing list