Spoken Dialogue Systems (Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies)

Considerable progress has been made in recent years in the development of dialogue systems that support robust and efficient human-machine interaction using spoken language. Spoken dialogue technology allows various interactive applications to be built and used for practical purposes, and research focuses on issues that aim to increase the system's communicative competence by including aspects of error correction, cooperation, multimodality, and adaptation in context. This book gives a comprehensive view of state-of-the-art techniques that are used to build spoken dialogue systems. It provides an overview of the basic issues such as system architectures, various dialogue management methods, system evaluation, and also surveys advanced topics concerning extensions of the basic model to more conversational setups. The goal of the book is to provide an introduction to the methods, problems, and solutions that are used in dialogue system development and evaluation. It presents dialogue modelling and system development issues relevant in both academic and industrial environments and also discusses requirements and challenges for advanced interaction management and future research. Table of Contents: Preface / Introduction to Spoken Dialogue Systems / Dialogue Management / Error Handling / Case Studies: Advanced Approaches to Dialogue Management / Advanced Issues / Methodologies and Practices of Evaluation / Future Directions / References / Author Biographies

Kristiina Jokinen is an adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki and University of Tampere, Finland, and a visiting professor of intelligent user interfaces at the University of Tartu, Estonia. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Manchester, UK, and worked for four years in Japan as a JSPS research fellow at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology and as an invited researcher at ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research) Laboratories in Kyoto. In Finland, she has played a leading role in several academic and industrial research projects concerning natural language interactive systems, spoken dialogue management, and multimodality. Her current interests focus on human nonverbal communication, gestures, and facial expressions. Her book Constructive Dialogue Management–Speech Interaction and Rational Agents has recently been published by John Wiley & Sons. She is the secretary of SIGDial, the ACL/ISCA Special Interest Group for Discourse and Dialogue.