An advanced platform to speed up the design of multilingual dialog applications for multiple modalities

D’Haro, Luis Fernando; Córdoba, Ricardo de; Ferreiros, Javier; Hamerich, Stefan W.; Schless, Volker; Kladis, Basilis; Schubert, Volker; Kocsis, Otilia; Igel, Stefan; Pardo, José Manuel

doi:10.1016/j.specom.2005.11.001

Cited by 9 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…According to this evaluation, the most appreciated accelerations were the automatic generation of action proposals for each dialog and the ease in designing the state flow model. Although not described in this paper, the platform has been used for successfully creating complex applications such as a banking application for a commercial product by a Greek bank with very good results, as well as for a second application, called CitizenCare, that offers basic voice information retrieval system functionality in the context of public authorities available in both German and English (see D'Haro et al, 2006).…”

Section: Definition Of Specific Actions At Each Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Application of backend database contents and structure to the design of spoken dialog services

D’Haro

Córdoba

Montero

et al. 2012

Expert Systems with Applications

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Current development platforms for designing spoken dialog services feature different kinds of strategies to help designers build, test, and deploy their applications. In general, these platforms are made up of several assistants that handle the different design stages (e.g. definition of the dialog flow, prompt and grammar definition, database connection, or to debug and test the running of the application). In spite of all the advances in this area, in general the process of designing spoken-based dialog services is a time consuming task that needs to be accelerated. In this paper we describe a complete development platform that reduces the design time by using different types of acceleration strategies based on using information from the data model structure and database contents, as well as cumulative information obtained throughout the successive steps in the design. Thanks to these accelerations, the interaction with the platform is simplified and the design is reduced, in most cases, to simple confirmations to the "proposals" that the platform automatically provides at each stage.Different kinds of proposals are available to complete the application flow such as the possibility of selecting which information slots should be requested to the user together, predefined templates for common dialogs, the most probable actions that make up each state defined in the flow, different solutions to solve specific speech-modality problems such as the presentation of the lists of retrieved results after querying the backend database. The platform also includes accelerations for creating speech grammars and prompts, and the SQL queries for accessing the database at runtime.Finally, we will describe the setup and results obtained in a simultaneous summative, subjective and objective evaluations with different designers used to test the usability of the proposed accelerations as well as their contribution to reducing the design time and interaction.

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Section: Definition Of Specific Actions At Each Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Application of backend database contents and structure to the design of spoken dialog services

D’Haro

Córdoba

Montero

et al. 2012

Expert Systems with Applications

Self Cite

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“…In (D'Haro et al, 2006), we described our initial steps to include several acceleration strategies to the design, based mainly on exploiting the structure of the backend datábase and with a special emphasis in proposing accelerations for the assistant used to define the dialog flow at a high level (i.e. modality and language independent, see Section 3.5).…”

Section: Incorporation Of Datábase Contents Information In the Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In (D'Haro et al, 2006 we describe in detail the initial platform, our efforts in separating the general and high-level definition of the dialog flow from the specific details imposed by each modality, language and user profile, as well as the differences between operating systems and runtime platforms by using several standard languages. Finally, we also describe our first attempts to accelerate the design using only information from the data model structure and by proposing different kinds of actions for completing the dialog flow.…”

Section: Platform Background and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This distribution also helps the designer to créate several versions of the same service (for different modalities and languages) in a single step at the intermedí-ate level. In the figure, the assistants in yellow are those that have been recently modified or extended in relation to previous versions of the platform, described in (D'Haro et al, 2006), and in those white have not been modified at all. Detailed information will be provided for the former.…”

Section: Paper Organizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The assistant is highly automated and intuitive, so it reduces the designer effort. In (D'Haro et al, 2006, we describe all the available acceleration strategies and capabilities in detail. Briefly, the most important ones are:…”

Section: Strategies Applied To the Retrieval Model Assistant (Rma)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Design and evaluation of acceleration strategies for speeding up the development of dialog applications

D’Haro

Córdoba

San-Segundo

et al. 2011

Speech Communication

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In this paper, we describe a complete development platform that features difíerent innovative acceleration strategies, not included in any other current platform, that simplify and speed up the definition of the difíerent elements required to design a spoken dialog service. The proposed accelerations are mainly based on using the information from the backend datábase schema and contents, as well as cumulative information produced throughout the difíerent steps in the design. Thanks to these accelerations, the interaction between the designer and the platform is improved, and in most cases the design is reduced to simple confirmations of the "proposals" that the platform dynamically pro vides at each step.In addition, the platform provides several other accelerations such as configurable templates that can be used to define the difíerent tasks in the service or the dialogs to obtain or show information to the user, automatic proposals for the best way to request slot contents from the user (i.e. using mixed-initiative forms or directed forms), an assistant that offers the set of more probable actions required to complete the definition of the difíerent tasks in the application, or another assistant for solving specific modality details such as confirmations of user answers or how to present them the lists of retrieved results after querying the backend datábase. Additionally, the platform also allows the creation of speech grammars and prompts, datábase access functions, and the possibility of using mixed initiative and over-answering dialogs. In the paper we also describe in detail each assistant in the platform, emphasizing the difíerent kind of methodologies followed to facilitate the design process at each one.Finally, we describe the results obtained in both a subjective and an objective evaluation with difíerent designers that confirm the viability, usefulness, and functionality of the proposed accelerations. Thanks to the accelerations, the design time is reduced in more than 56% and the number of keystrokes by 84%.

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Spoken Spanish generation from sign language

San-Segundo¹,

Pardo²,

Ferreiros³

et al. 2010

Interacting with Computers

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a b s t r a c tThis paper describes the development of a Spoken Spanish generator from sign-writing. The sign language considered was the Spanish sign language (LSE: Lengua de Signos Española). This system consists of an advanced visual interface (where a deaf person can specify a sequence of signs in signwriting), a language translator (for generating the sequence of words in Spanish), and finally, a text to speech converter. The visual interface allows a sign sequence to be defined using several sign-writing alternatives. The paper details the process for designing the visual interface proposing solutions for HCI-specific challenges when working with the Deaf (i.e. important difficulties in writing Spanish or limited sign coverage for describing abstract or conceptual ideas). Three strategies were developed and combined for language translation to implement the final version of the language translator module. The summative evaluation, carried out with Deaf from Madrid and Toledo, includes objective measurements from the system and subjective information from questionnaires. The paper also describes the first Spanish-LSE parallel corpus for language processing research focused on specific domains. This corpus includes more than 4000 Spanish sentences translated into LSE. These sentences focused on two restricted domains: the renewal of the identity document and driver's license. This corpus also contains all sign descriptions in several sign-writing specifications generated with a new version of the eSign Editor. This new version includes a grapheme to phoneme system for Spanish and a SEA-HamNoSys converter.

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An advanced platform to speed up the design of multilingual dialog applications for multiple modalities

Cited by 9 publications

References 41 publications

Application of backend database contents and structure to the design of spoken dialog services

Application of backend database contents and structure to the design of spoken dialog services

Design and evaluation of acceleration strategies for speeding up the development of dialog applications

Spoken Spanish generation from sign language

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