project 00.05

Multimodal Dialogue Systems for Industrial Applications


Background

Project goals


Related activities

Industrial cooperation


Activities

Scientific production


Related activities

Currently (2003) three projects relate to the project Multimodal Dialogue Systems for Industrial Applications, but the research activities have been pursued in past projects as well.

Current projects

Many results from the project will be made available as Open Source on nlpFarm. This is an activity mainly carried out in the project Development of Generic Resources for Language Technology.

The project Multimodal Interaction for Information Services aims at incorporating document and text processing techniques in multimodal dialogue systems. Especially the results on information and text processing and the work on shared ontologies, are useable in this project.

Finally, the project on Language, Internet and Mobility brings issues on mobility into the project Multimodal Dialogue Systems for Industrial Applications.

Past projects

We used MALIN to develop a prototype multi-modal dialogue system as part of a KFB-project, with the timetables of Östgötatrafiken as the application domain. The dialogue system utilised dialogue capabilities and, thus, allowed for complex information requests. The dialogue system also included the DKM, so that we could resolve vague temporal and spatial requests. In this project we also developed a new graphical interface, primarily designed for conducting empirical investigations, where for instance geographical information is presented in a novel and more intuitive way.

Another project which we have been involved in was the SDS (Swedish Dialogue Systems) project, a national project (Göteborg University, KTH, Lund University and Linköping University) on development of dialogue systems for Swedish. The project was funded by the joint HSFR and NUTEK research program on language technology which ended in June 2000. Within this project we have developed a new method for empirical investigations - distillation, i.e. re-writing natural dialogues to reflect the dialogue of a human-computer interaction.

We have been involved in the SITI financed project called Speech-Controlled Interactive News Service, SCIN. The objective of SCIN 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 developed a research prototype demonstrating the techniques on a single domain such as sports news or trade news.

We were also involved in the SITI financed project Miina, Multimodal interaction for information appliances. In Miina we combined research on dialogue systems with techniques for document analysis, such as information extraction and text mining. The introduction of a separate module for domain knowledge management, the DKM, made the MALIN framework suitable for development of dialogue systems for unstructured and open domains. The DKM forms the link between the dialogue system and the partially structured data that results from information extraction.


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Last updated: 2004-04-22