Welcome to the web pages of
Speech-Controlled Interactive News Service
The objective of the project is to adapt and develop methods from language technology and information science that support speech controlled interaction with information services.
Specific issues relate to dialogue management and information organisation to increase interactivity, the use of a talking head to enhance speech perception and act as a persona for the system and enhanced speech synthesis for reading text that contain new coinages and foreign words such as names of people, cities and organisations with origin in a number of different languages. The project will also develop a research prototype demonstrating the techniques on a single domain such as sports news or trade news.
Future news services can be expected to be more interactive and reactive to user's preferences. While one-way news services such as newspapers and news programs on radio and television will probably continue to exist, and news sites on the Internet can provide a host of news items that the user can search, an interactive service that can provide the news in different modes, e.g. by displaying a text or reading it out to the user and moreover respond to spoken requests from the user will have several advantages. For instance, after having heard or read a news item, the user may want to have instant access to background information or an update of related events.
In addition, most of the techniques that will be studied in the project are interesting in themselves and have many applications outside the realm of news services.
The project is a joint two-year project between the NLP group at Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping university and Telia Research AB. The project is organised around five strands (or sub-projects) which are held together by a common framework and a common application. Each sub-project is focused on a specific research topic with a senior researcher in charge and, in most cases, a doctoral student employed.
The SCIN-project is part of the e-Home key action of the E-Society program run by SITI Ost.
Senior staff
Lars Ahrenberg, IDA (Project leader)
Arne Jönsson, IDA
Bertil Lyberg, IDA and Telia Research AB
Research staff
Fredrik Arvidsson, IDA
Lars Degerstedt, IDA
Christel Ekvall, Telia Research AB
Annika Flycht Eriksson, IDA
Anders Lindström, IDA and Telia Research AB
Mikael Randén, Telia Research AB
Lena Santamarta, IDA