Christine Pao

JUPlTER: a telephone-based conversational interface for weather information

In early 1997, our group initiated a project to develop JUPITER, a conversational interface that allows users to obtain worldwide weather forecast information over the telephone using spoken dialogue. It has served as the primary research platform for our group on many issues related to human language technology, including telephone-based speech recognition, robust language understanding, language generation, dialogue modeling, and multilingual interfaces. Over a two year period since coming online in May 1997, JUPITER has received, via a toll-free number in North America, over 30000 calls (totaling over 180000 utterances), mostly from naive users. The purpose of this paper is to describe our development effort in terms of the underlying human language technologies as well as other system-related issues such as utterance rejection and content harvesting. We also present some evaluation results on the system and its components.

WHEELS: a conversational system in the automobile classifieds domain

WHEELS is a conversational system which provides access to a database of electronic automobile classified advertisements. It leverages off the existing spoken language technologies from our GALAXY system, and enables users to search through a database of 5,000 automobile classifieds. The current end-to-end system can respond to spoken or typed inputs, and produces a short list of entries meeting the constraints specified by the user. The system operates in mixed-initiative mode, asking for specific information but not requiring compliance. The output information is conveyed to the user with visual tables and synthesized speech. This system incorporates a new type of category bigram, created with the innovative use of the natural language component. Future plans to extend the system include operating in a displayless mode, and porting the system to Spanish.

PEGASUS: a spoken dialogue interface for on-line air travel planning

Abstract This paper describes PEGASUS, a spoken dialogue interface for on-line air travel planning that we have recently developed. PEGASUS leverages off our spoken language technology development in the ATIS domain, and enables users to book flights using the American Airlines EAASY SABRE system. The input query is transformed by the speech understanding system to a frame representation that captures its meaning. The tasks of the System Manager include transforming the semantic representation into an EAASY SABRE command, transmitting it to the application backend, formatting and interpreting the resulting information, and managing the dialogue. Preliminary evaluation results suggest that users can learn to make productive use of PEGASUS for travel planning, although much work remains to be done.

WebGALAXY: beyond point and click—a conversational interface to a browser

Abstract This paper presents WebGALAXY, a flexible multi-modal user interface system that allows wide access to selected information on the World Wide Web (WWW) by integrating spoken and typed natural language queries and hypertext navigation. WebALAXY extends our GALAXY spoken language system, a distributed client-server system for retrieving information from online sources through speech and natural language. WebGALAXY supports a spoken user interface via a standard telephone line as well as a graphical user interface via a standard Web browser using either Java/JavaScript or a cgi-bin/forms front end. Natural language understanding is performed by the system and information servers retrieve the requested information from various online resources including WWW servers, Gopher servers and CompuServe. Currently, queries about three domains are supported: weather, air travel, and points of interest around Boston.

Pegasus: a spoken language interface for on-line air travel planning

This paper describes PEGASUS, a spoken language interface for on-line air travel planning that we have recently developed. PEGASUS leverages off our spoken language technology development in the ATIS domain, and enables users to book flights using the American Airlines EAASY SABRE system. The input query is transformed by the speech understanding system to a frame representation that captures its meaning. The tasks of the System Manager include transforming the semantic representation into an EAASY SABRE command, transmitting it to the application backend, formatting and interpreting the resulting information, and managing the dialogue. Preliminary evaluation results suggest that users can learn to make productive use of PEGASUS for travel planning, although much work remains to be done.

Multimodal discourse modelling in a multi-user multi-domain environment

The paper describes the discourse component of GALAXY, a multidomain, multimodal conversational system. In designing this module, we are attempting to develop domain independent mechanisms, controlled via declarative tables, to promote convenient instantiation of a discourse component for each new domain. Direct anaphoric reference as well as elliptical reference are dealt with appropriately. Users can also refer verbally to items selected via mouse clicks. Cross domain references are particularly challenging, as is the ambiguity problem arising from different case roles for different subdomains. Users often utter fragments, sometimes in response to server initiated dialogue exchanges, so an extensive fragment interpretation mechanism is supported. GALAXY focuses on information of interest to a traveller, including world wide weather and air travel information, and tourist assistance for the city of Boston (USA).