Robert Belvin

Development of the HRL route navigation dialogue system

In this paper we report on our work on a prototype route navigation dialogue system for use in a vehicle. The system delivers spoken turn-by-turn directions, and has been developed to accept naturally phrased navigation queries, as part of our overall effort to create an in-vehicle information system which delivers information as requested while placing minimal cognitive load on the driver.

Transonics: a speech to speech system for English-Persian interactions

In this paper, we describe the first phase of development of our speech-to-speech system between English and Modem Persian under the DARPA Babylon program. We give an overview of the various system components: the front end ASR, the machine translation system and the speech generation system. Challenges such as the sparseness of available spoken language data and solutions that have been employed to maximize the obtained benefits from using these limited resources are examined. Efforts in the creation of the user interface and the underlying dialog management system for mediated communication are described.

Transonics: A Practical Speech-to-Speech Translator for English-Farsi Medical Dialogs

We briefly describe a two-way speech-to-speech English-Farsi translation system prototype developed for use in doctor-patient interactions. The overarching philosophy of the developers has been to create a system that enables effective communication, rather than focusing on maximizing component-level performance. The discussion focuses on the general approach and evaluation of the system by an independent government evaluation team.

Multimodal interaction techniques for situational awareness and command of robotic combat entities

In the next generation of Army combat vehicles, the future combat system (FCS), lightly-armored robotic vehicles are commanded by human commanders operating from within moving command vehicles, and well back from the forward edge of the battle area. Two key questions to be answered for the successful realization of FCS are how can the commander maintain situational awareness and what methods best allow the commander to interact with these robotic forces to achieve the mission goals. In our research, our approach is to immerse the commander in a virtual battlespace, with capability to directly interact with visual representations of the robotic entities. We developed a multimodal (visual, speech, and gesture) interaction method and specific techniques that allow the commander to navigate the virtual battlespace and command robotic entities while seated in a vehicle and without use of a keyboard.

Modeling threat behaviors in surveillance video metadata for detection using an Analogical Reasoner

Video surveillance systems are generating much more imagery than can be cost-effectively analyzed by human analysts. One approach to the automated analysis of this imagery is to split the problem into video-to-metadata and metadata-to-interpretation tasks. We describe a system for the metadata-to-interpretation task that automatically extracts propositional graphs from the video metadata and generates graphs for use in an analogical reasoning system to detect threat behaviors that occurred in the original video scene.1 2