Title
A robust system for human-machine dialogue in telephony-based applications
Abstract
This paper presents a real-time system for human-machine spoken dialogue on the telephone in task-oriented domains. The system has been tested in a large trial with inexperienced users and it has proved robust enough to allow spontaneous interactions even for people with poor recognition performance. The robust behaviour of the system has been achieved by combining the use of specific language models during the recognition phase of analysis, the tolerance toward spontaneous speech phenomena, the activity of a robust parser, and the use of pragmatic-based dialogue knowledge. This integration of the different modules allows the system to deal with partial or total breakdowns at other levels of analysis. We report the field trial data of the system with respect to speech recognition metrics of word accuracy and sentence understanding rate, time-to-completion, time-to-acquisition of crucial parameters, and degree of success of the interactions in providing the speakers with the information they required. The evaluation data show that most of the subjects were able to interact fruitfully with the system. These results suggest that the design choices made to achieve robust behaviour are a promising way to create usable spoken language telephone systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
1997
10.1007/BF02208822
I. J. Speech Technology
Field
DocType
Volume
USable,Human–machine system,Computer science,Speech recognition,Artificial intelligence,Natural language processing,Parsing,Telephony,Sentence,Language model,Spoken language,Word accuracy
Journal
2
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
1572-8110
7
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.90
10
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
dario albesano19512.85
Paolo Baggia2489.91
Morena Danieli316132.23
Roberto Gemello422832.16
Elisabetta Gerbino5153.64
C Rullent6206.16