Exploring Speech-Enabled Dialogue with the Galaxy Communicator Infrastructure

Exploring Speech-Enabled Dialogue with the Galaxy Samuel BayerCommunicator Infrastructure The MITRE Corporation 202 Burlington Rd. Bedford, MA 01730 sam@mitre.org Christine Doran The MITRE Corporation 202 Burlington Rd. Bedford, MA 01730 cdoran@mitre.org Bryan George The MITRE Corporation 11493 Sunset Hills Rd. Reston, VA 20190 bgeorge@mitre.org ABSTRACT This demonstration will motivate some of the significant properties of the Galaxy Communicator Software Infrastructure and show how they support the goals of the DARPA Communicator program. Keywords Spoken dialogue, speech interfaces 1. INTRODUCTION The DARPA Communicator program [1], now in its second fiscal year, is intended to push the boundaries of speech- enabled dialogue systems by enabling a freer interchange between human and machine. A crucial enabling technology for the DARPA Communicator program is the Galaxy Communicator software infrastructure (GCSI), which provides a common software platform for dialogue system development. This infrastructure was initially designed and constructed by MIT [2], and is now maintained and enhanced by the MITRE Corporation. This demonstration will motivate some of the significant properties of this infrastructure and show how they support the goals of the DARPA Communicator program. 2. HIGHLIGHTED PROPERTIES The GCSI is a distributed hub-and-spoke infrastructure which allows the programmer to develop Communicator-compliant servers in C, C++, Java, Python, or Allegro Common Lisp. This system is based on message passing rather than CORBA- or RPC-style APIs. The hub in this infrastructure supports routing of messages consisting of key-value pairs, but also supports logging and rule-based scripting. Such an infrastructure has the following desirable properties: • The scripting capabilities of the hub allow the programmer to weave together servers which may not otherwise have been intended to work together, by rerouting messages and their responses and transforming their keys. • The scripting capabilities of the hub allow the programmer to insert simple tools and filters to convert data among formats. • The scripting capabilities of the hub make it easy to modify the message flow of control in real time. • The scripting capabilities of the hub and the simplicity of message passing make it simple to build up systems bit by bit. • The standard infrastructure allows the Communicator program to develop platform- and programming- language-independent service standards for recognition, synthesis, and other better-understood resources. • The standard infrastructure allows members of the Communicator program to contribute generally useful tools to other program participants. This demonstration will illustrate a number of these properties. 3. DEMO CONFIGURATION AND CONTENT By way of illustration, this demo will simulate a process of assembling a Communicator-compliant system, while at the same time exemplifying some of the more powerful aspects of the infrastructure. The demonstration has three phases, representing three successively more complex configuration steps. We use a graphical display of the Communicator hub to make it easy to see the behavior of this system. As you can see in Figure 1, the hub is connected to eight servers: • MITRE's Java Desktop Audio Server (JDAS) • MIT SUMMIT recognizer, using MIT's Mercury travel domain language model • CMU Sphinx recognizer, …

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