project 00.05

Multimodal Dialogue Systems for Industrial Applications


Background

Project goals


Related activities

Industrial cooperation


Activities

Scientific production


Industrial and Ceniit cooperation

We are involved in the development of dialogue systems for public information. This is mainly done in co-operation with Ida Infront. The first application domain was tax information. From Riksskatteverkets (RSV) tax information brochure a question-answering system was developed.The second application in this project utilise legal union documents and will also allow for more advanced dialogue features.

In a project with the Swedish Public Service Television Company (SVT) we have developed a dialogue system based on information in a bird encyclopedia. The is based on the LINLIN framework and the encyclopedia, in raw text form. The encyclopedia provides one view of the ontology in this domain and a corpus of user questions collected on the Internet another. The dialogue system, BirdQuest, utilise both ontologies. In the current implementation the encyclopedia has actually been transformed into SQL database format and, thus, the dialogue system allows for advanced information serach.

In a project with Nokia Home Communications our model for dialogue management was used to develop a system where ITV viewers can get further information, e.g. about a program or background information. The dialogue system was implemented according to our iterative development method. The dialogue system started off with a very simple question-answering system that has been iteratively refined, first by including a dialogue history allowing for follow up questions and then with sud-dialogue capabilities allowing for instance for clarification requests. The dialogue system has been evaluated providing implications for design of multimodal interaction in such a setting. We have also done investigations on the users' information needs and conducted a study on feedback strategies.

The cooperation with Nokia ended 2001 but we have continued conducting research on means for information access for digital TV now with Kreatel and Zenterio. We have developed a system that helps a user select interesting movies based on the users' ratings of films seen before. Crucial for this system is the ability to model the user' preferences and to utilise them when recommending new films.

The project is also connected with the Speech Technology Lab at IDA which is funded by Telia Research.


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Last updated: 2004-04-22