Recent Developments in the Experimental “WAXHOLM” Dialog System

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE EXPERIMENTAL "WAXHOLM" DIALOG SYSTEM Roll Carlson Department of Speech Communication and Music Acoustics, KTI-I, Stockholm, Sweden ABSTRACT Recently we have begun to build the basic tools for a genetic speech-dialog system. The main modules, their function and internal ccommunication have been specified. The different components ~e connected through a computer network. A preliminary version of the system has been tested, using simplified versions of the modules. The dialog component of the system is described by a dialog grammar with the help of semantic features. Probabilities are also used in this process. We will give a general overview of the system and describe some of the components in more detail. Application-specific data are collected with the help of Wizard-of-Oz techniques. Currently the system is used during the data collection and the bionic wizard replaces only the speech-recognition module. 1. INTRODUCTION Our research group at KTH* is currently building a genetic system in which speech synthesis and speech recognition can be studied in a man-machine dialog framework. In addition, the system should facilitate the collection of speech and text data that are required for development. The system was first presented at the Eurospeech '93 conference [1]. The current paper is an expanded version of that paper. We will give a general overview of the system and describe some of the components in more detail. The dialog management component has recently been reformulated in a more general framework and is presented in the latter part of the paper. 2. THE DEMONSTRATOR APPLICATION The demonstrator application, which we call WAXHOLM, gives information on boat traffic in the Stockholm archipelago (see Figure 1). I references time tables for a fleet of some twenty * The Waxholm group consists of staff and students at the Department of Speech Communication and Music Acoustics, KTH. Most of the efforts are done part time. The members of the group in alphabetic order are: Mats Blomberg, Rolf Carlson, Kjell Elenius, Bj6rn Granstr6m, Joakim Gustafson, Sheri Hunnicutt, Jesper H6gberg, Roger Lindell, Lennart Neovius, Lennart Nord, Antonio de Serpa-Leitao and Nikko Str6m boats from the Waxholm company which connects about two hundred ports. Different days of the week have different time- tables. Besides the speech recognition and synthesis components, the system contains modules that handle graphic information such as pictures, maps, charts, and time-tables. This information can be presented to the user at his/her request The application has great similarities to the ATIS domain within the ARPA community and other similar tasks in Europe, for example SUNDIAL. The possibility of expanding the task in many directions is an advantage for our future research on interactive dialog systems. An initial version of the system based on text input has been running since September 1992. 2.1. The database In addition to boat time-tables the database also contains, and also information about port locations, hotels, camping places, and restaurants in the Stockholm archipelago. This information is accessed by the standardized query language (SQL, Oracle). The time-table, which is the primary part …

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