Yoshifumi Nagata

Speech dialogue system for facilitating improved human-computer interaction

A speech dialogue system capable of realizing natural and smooth dialogue between the system and a human user, and easy maneuverability of the system. In the system, a semantic content of input speech from a user is understood and a semantic content determination of a response output is made according to the understood semantic content of the input speech. Then, a speech response and a visual response according to the determined response output are generated and outputted to the user. The dialogue between the system and the user is managed by controlling transitions between user states during which the input speech is to be entered and system states during which the system response is to be outputted. The understanding of a semantic content of input speech from a user is made by detecting keywords in the input speech, with the keywords to be detected in the input speech limited in advance, according to a state of a dialogue between the user and the system.

Noisy spontaneous speech understanding using noise immunity keyword spotting with adaptive speech response cancellation

The system described is an extension of TOSBURG (taste-oriented speech dialogue system based on speech understanding and response generation), TOSBURG II. To facilitate robust human-computer interaction, a new component has been introduced: adaptive cancellation of synthetic speech response. In addition, noise immunity learning has been extended to dialogue speech contaminated by an uncancelled component of a synthetic speech response. The cancellation allows the user to interrupt speech responses of the system for more efficient human-computer interaction. A user-initiated dialogue manager and a multimodal response generator have been integrated to construct a speaker-independent dialogue system for a fast-food ordering task. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness of adaptive speech response cancellation and the extension of noise immunity learning.<<ETX>>