ALTA Logo Proceedings of ALTSS/ALTW, Melbourne, December 2003

Dialogue systems

Robert Dale, Macquarie University and Dominique Estival, DSTO

ABSTRACT:

This practically-oriented course has two principal aims: - To provide an introduction to what is involved in building real spoken language dialog systems. - To give some practical experience in constructing dialog systems. After a brief introduction to spoken language dialog systems (SLDSs) and the key elements involved in their development, students will use a dialog systems toolkit to build a simple dialog system. We will explore how the task of dialog design interacts with grammar and prompt writing, and look at how complex grammars can be developed. The course will end by looking at current standards such as VoiceXML and SALT, and discussing where dialog systems are headed in the future.

BIO:

Professor Robert Dale is Director of the Centre for Language Technology at Macquarie University in Sydney, where he teaches on various aspects of language technology. After completing his PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in 1989, he taught in the Centre for Cognitive Science at Edinburgh, before taking up a position with Microsoft in Sydney in 1994. He was Director of the Microsoft Research Institute at Macquarie University (1996-1999). His research interests include intelligent text processing; natural language generation; spoken language dialog systems; and reference and anaphora. He is author or editor of five books and around 60 papers in various aspects of natural language processing, and is editor of the Journal of Computational Linguistics. [http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~rdale/]

Dominique Estival has been a Senior Research Scientist at DSTO since early 2002. After receiving her PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986, she started working as a computational linguist in industry: first in a machine translation company (Weidner, Chicago, USA; 1986-88) and then at Wang Laboratories (Boston, USA; 1988-89). She was a researcher at ISSCO (Geneva, Switzerland, 1989-1995) before coming to Australia to take up the position of lecturer in Computational Linguistics at the University of Melbourne (1995-1998). She joined Syrinx Speech Systems in 1999 to head the Natural Language Processing group and lead the NLP R&D project to develop a natural language telephone dialogue system. Her research interests have included the investigation of the computational modelling of language change, machine translation, grammar formalisms, grammar development and linguistic engineering and spoken dialogue systems. [http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~destival/]

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