Noboru Miyazaki

Understanding Unsegmented User Utterances in Real-Time Spoken Dialogue Systems

This paper proposes a method for incrementally understanding user utterances whose semantic boundaries are not known and responding in real time even before boundaries are determined. It is an integrated parsing and discourse processing method that updates the partial result of understanding word by word, enabling responses based on the partial result. This method incrementally finds plausible sequences of utterances that play crucial roles in the task execution of dialogues, and utilizes beam search to deal with the ambiguity of boundaries as well as syntactic and semantic ambiguities. The results of a preliminary experiment demonstrate that this method understands user utterances better than an understanding method that assumes pauses to be semantic boundaries.

Evaluating discourse understanding in spoken dialogue systems

This article describes a method for creating an evaluation measure for discourse understanding in spoken dialogue systems. No well-established measure has yet been proposed for evaluating discourse understanding, which has made it necessary to evaluate it only on the basis of the systems total performance. Such evaluations, however, are greatly influenced by task domains and dialogue strategies. To find a measure that enables good estimation of system performance only from discourse understanding results, we enumerated possible discourse-understanding-related metrics and calculated their correlation with the systems total performance through dialogue experiments.

WIT: A Toolkit for Building Robust and Real-Time Spoken Dialogu Systems

This paper describes WIT, a toolkit for building spoken dialogue systems. WIT features an incremental understanding mechanism that enables robust utterance understanding and realtime responses. WITs ability to compile domain-dependent system specifications into internal knowledge sources makes building spoken dialogue systems much easier than it is from scratch.