Jan Schehl

The SAMMIE System: Multimodal In-Car Dialogue

The SAMMIE system is an in-car multi-modal dialogue system for an MP3 application. It is used as a testing environment for our research in natural, intuitive mixed-initiative interaction, with particular emphasis on multimodal output planning and realization aimed to produce output adapted to the context, including the drivers attention state w.r.t. the primary driving task.

Generation of output style variation in the SAMMIE dialogue system

A dialogue system can present itself and/or address the user as an active agent by means of linguistic constructions in personal style, or suppress agentivity by using impersonal style. We describe how we generate and control personal and impersonal style variation in the output of SAMMIE, a multimodal in-car dialogue system for an MP3 player. We carried out an experiment to compare subjective evaluation judgments and input style alignment behavior of users interacting with versions of the system generating output in personal vs. impersonal style. Although our results are consistent with earlier findings obtained with simulated systems, the effects are weaker.

The SAMMIE multimodal dialogue corpus meets the nite XML toolkit

We demonstrate work in progress using the Nite XML Toolkit on a corpus of multimodal dialogues with an MP3 player collected in a Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) experiments and annotated with a rich feature set at several layers. We designed an NXT data model, converted experiment log file data and manual transcriptions into NXT, and are building annotation tools using NXT libraries.