We realize a telephone-based collaborative natural language dialogue system.

This paper presents a novel technique that allows testing spoken dialogue systems by means of an automatic generation of conversations. The technique permits to easily test spoken dialogue systems under a variety of lab-simulated conditions, as it is easy to vary or change the utterance corpus used to check the performance of the system. The technique is based on the use of a module called user simulator whose purpose is to behave as real users when they interact with dialogue systems. The behaviour of the simulator is decided by means of diverse scenarios that represent the goals of the users. The simulator aim is to achieve the goals set in the scenarios during the interaction with the dialogue system. We have applied the technique to test a dialogue system developed in our lab. The test has been carried out considering different levels of white and babble noise as well as a VTS noise compensation technique. The results prove that the dialogue system performance is worse under the babble noise conditions. The VTS technique has been effective when dealing with noisy utterances and has lead to better experimental results, particularly for the white noise. The technique has permitted to detect problems in the dialogue strategies employed to handle confirmation turns and recognition errors, suggesting that these strategies must be improved. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

JAVOX provides a mechanism for the development of spoken-language systems from existing desktop applications. We present an architecture that al- lows existing Jav programs to be speech-enabled with no source-code modification, through the use of reflection and automatic modification to the application 's compiled code. The grammars used in JAVOX are based on the Java Speech Grammar Format (JSGF); JAVOX grammars have an additional semantic component based on our JAVOX Scripting Language (JSL). JAVOX has been successfully demonstrated on real-world applications.

This paper presents a novel technique that allows testing spoken dialogue systems by means of an automatic generation of conversations. The technique permits to easily test spoken dialogue systems under a variety of lab-simulated conditions, as it is easy to vary or change the utterance corpus used to check the performance of the system. The technique is based on the use of a module called user simulator whose purpose is to behave as real users when they interact with dialogue systems. The behaviour of the simulator is decided by means of diverse scenarios that represent the goals of the users. The simulator aim is to achieve the goals set in the scenarios during the interaction with the dialogue system. We have applied the technique to test a dialogue system developed in our lab. The test has been carried out considering different levels of white and babble noise as well as a VTS noise compensation technique. The results prove that the dialogue system performance is worse under the babble noise conditions. The VTS technique has been effective when dealing with noisy utterances and has lead to better experimental results, particularly for the white noise. The technique has permitted to detect problems in the dialogue strategies employed to handle confirmation turns and recognition errors, suggesting that these strategies must be improved. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper describes SpeechForms, a system that uses novel techniques to automatically identify form element semantics and form element content, and to semi-automatically generate language models that allow users to fill out each web form element by voice. Preliminary experimental results show that simple per-element language models are faster and may be more accurate than statistical n-gram language models trained on large amounts of web text data. Index Terms: language modeling, form understanding, information retrieval