Spoken Dialogue Systems
Bob Carpenter and Jennifer Chu-Carroll
June 20, 1999
Tutorial Overview: Data Flow
Part I
Signal
Processing
Part II
Semantic
Interpretation
Speech
Recognition
Discourse
Interpretation
Dialogue
Management
Speech
Synthesis
June 1999
Response
Generation
2
Speech and Audio Processing
• Signal processing:
– Convert the audio wave into a sequence of feature vectors
• Speech recognition:
– Decode the sequence of feature vectors into a sequence of words
• Semantic interpretation:
– Determine the meaning of the recognized words
• Speech synthesis:
– Generate synthetic speech from a marked-up word string
June 1999
3
Tutorial Overview: Outline
Part I
Part II
• Signal processing
• Speech recognition
• Discourse and dialogue
– Discourse interpretation
– Dialogue management
– Response generation
– acoustic modeling
– language modeling
– decoding
• Semantic interpretation
• Speech synthesis
June 1999
• Dialogue evaluation
• Data collection
4
Acoustic Waves
• Human speech generates a wave
– like a loudspeaker moving
• A wave for the words “speech lab” looks like:
s
p
ee
ch
l a
b
“l” to “a”
transition:
Graphs from Simon Arnfield’s web tutorial on speech, Sheffield:
http://lethe.leeds.ac.uk/research/cogn/speech/tutorial/
June 1999
5
Acoustic Sampling
• 10 ms frame (ms = millisecond = 1/1000 second)
• ~25 ms window around frame to smooth signal processing
25 ms
...
10ms
a1
June 1999
a2
Result:
Acoustic Feature Vectors
a3
6
Spectral Analysis
• Frequency gives pitch; amplitude gives volume
– sampling at ~8 kHz phone, ~16 kHz mic (kHz=1000 cycles/sec)
s
p
ee
ch
l
a
• Fourier transform of wave yields a spectrogram
– darkness indicates energy at each frequency
– hundreds to thousands of frequency samples
June 1999
7
b
Acoustic Features: Mel Scale Filterbank
• Derive Mel Scale Filterbank coefficients
• Mel scale:
– models non-linearity of human audio perception
– mel(f) = 2595 log10(1 + f / 700)
– roughly linear to 1000Hz and then logarithmic
• Filterbank
– collapses large number of FFT parameters by filtering with ~20
triangular filters spaced on mel scale
...
m1 m2 m3 m4
June 1999
m5
m6
…
8
frequency
coefficients
Cepstral Coefficients
• Cepstral Transform is a discrete cosine transform of log
filterbank amplitudes:
 i

ci  (2 / N )  j 1 log m j cos ( j  0.5) 
N

1/ 2
N
• Result is ~12 Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC)
• Almost independent (unlike mel filterbank)
• Use Delta (velocity / first derivative) and Delta2 (acceleration
/ second derivative) of MFCC (+ ~24 features)
June 1999
9
Additional Signal Processing
• Pre-emphasis prior to Fourier transform to boost high level
energy
• Liftering to re-scale cepstral coefficients
• Channel Adaptation to deal with line and microphone
characteristics (example: cepstral mean normalization)
• Echo Cancellation to remove background noise (including
speech generated from the synthesizer)
• Adding a Total (log) Energy feature (+/- normalization)
• End-pointing to detect signal start and stop
June 1999
10
Tutorial Overview: Outline
Part I
Part II
• Signal processing
• Speech recognition
• Discourse and dialogue
– Discourse interpretation
– Dialogue management
– Response generation
– acoustic modeling
– language modeling
– decoding
• Semantic interpretation
• Speech synthesis
June 1999
• Dialogue evaluation
• Data collection
11
Properties of Recognizers
• Speaker Independent vs. Speaker Dependent
• Large Vocabulary (2K-200K words) vs. Limited Vocabulary
(2-200)
• Continuous vs. Discrete
• Speech Recognition vs. Speech Verification
• Real Time vs. multiples of real time
• Spontaneous Speech vs. Read Speech
• Noisy Environment vs. Quiet Environment
• High Resolution Microphone vs. Telephone vs. Cellphone
• Adapt to speaker vs. non-adaptive
• Low vs. High Latency
• With online incremental results vs. final results
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12
The Speech Recognition Problem
• Bayes’ Law
– P(a,b) = P(a|b) P(b) = P(b|a) P(a)
– Joint probability of a and b = probability of b times the probability of a
given b
• The Recognition Problem
– Find most likely sequence w of “words” given the sequence of
acoustic observation vectors a
– Use Bayes’ law to create a generative model
– ArgMaxw P(w|a) = ArgMaxw P(a|w) P(w) / P(a)
= ArgMaxw P(a|w) P(w)
• Acoustic Model:
• Language Model:
June 1999
P(a|w)
P(w)
13
Tutorial Overview: Outline
Part I
Part II
• Signal processing
• Speech recognition
• Discourse and dialogue
– Discourse interpretation
– Dialogue management
– Response generation
– acoustic modeling
– language modeling
– decoding
• Semantic interpretation
• Speech synthesis
June 1999
• Dialogue evaluation
• Data collection
14
Hidden Markov Models (HMMs)
• HMMs provide generative acoustic models P(a|w)
• probabilistic, non-deterministic finite-state automaton
– state n generates feature vectors with density Pn
– transitions from state j to n are probabilistic Pj,n
P1,1
P2,2
P1(.)
June 1999
P1,2
P3,3
P2(.)
15
P2,3
P3(.)
P3,4
HMMs: Single Gaussian Distribution
P1,1
P2,2
P1(.)
P1,2
P3,3
P2(.)
P2,3
• Outgoing likelihoods:
P3(.)
P
n
P3,4
j ,n
1
• Feature vector a generated by normal density (Gaussian)
with mean h and covariance matrix S
Pn (a)  N(a | hn , S n )
 (2 )
June 1999
d / 2
| Sn |
1 / 2
1
1
T
exp(  (a  hn ) S n (a  hn ))
2
16
HMMs: Gaussian Mixtures
• To account for variable pronunciations
• Each state generates acoustic vectors according to a linear
combination of m Gaussian models, weighted by lm:
Pn (a)  m ln,m N(a | hn,m , S n,m )
Three-component
mixture model in
two dimensions
June 1999
17
Acoustic Modeling with HMMs
• Train HMMs to represent subword units
• Units typically segmental; may vary in granularity
– phonological (~40 for English)
– phonetic (~60 for English)
– context-dependent triphones (~14,000 for English): models
temporal and spectral transitions between phones
– silence and noise are usually additional symbols
• Standard architecture is three successive states per
phone:
P1,1
P2,2
P1(.)
June 1999
P1,2
P3,3
P2(.)
18
P2,3
P3(.)
P3,4
Pronunciation Modeling
• Needed for speech recognition and synthesis
• Maps orthographic representation of words to sequence(s)
of phones
• Dictionary doesn’t cover language due to:
– open classes
– names
– inflectional and derivational morphology
• Pronunciation variation can be modeled with multiple
pronunciation and/or acoustic mixtures
• If multiple pronunciations are given, estimate likelihoods
• Use rules (e.g. assimilation, devoicing, flapping), or
statistical transducers
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Lexical HMMs
• Create compound HMM for each lexical entry by
concatenating the phones making up the pronunciation
– example of HMM for ‘lab’ (following ‘speech’ for crossword triphone)
ch-l+a
l
triphone:
phone:
P1,1
P2,2
P1(.)
P1,2
l-a+b
a
P3,3
P2(.)
P2,3
P1,1
P3(.)
P3,4
P2,2
P1(.)
P1,2
a-b+#
b
P3,3
P2(.)
P2,3
P1,1
P3(.)
P3,4
P2,2
P1(.)
P1,2
P3,3
P2(.)
P2,3
P3(.)
P3,4
• Multiple pronunciations can be weighted by likelihood into
compound HMM for a word
• (Tri)phone models are independent parts of word models
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20
HMM Training: Baum-Welch Re-estimation
• Determines the probabilities for the acoustic HMM models
• Bootstraps from initial model
– hand aligned data, previous models or flat start
• Allows embedded training of whole utterances:
– transcribe utterance to words w1,…,wk and generate a compound
HMM by concatenating compound HMMs for words: m1,…,mk
– calculate acoustic vectors: a1,…,an
• Iteratively converges to a new estimate
• Re-estimates all paths because states are hidden
• Provides a maximum likelihood estimate
– model that assigns training data the highest likelihood
June 1999
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Tutorial Overview: Outline
Part I
Part II
• Signal processing
• Speech recognition
• Discourse and dialogue
– Discourse interpretation
– Dialogue management
– Response generation
– acoustic modeling
– language modeling
– decoding
• Semantic interpretation
• Speech synthesis
June 1999
• Dialogue evaluation
• Data collection
22
Probabilistic Language Modeling: History
• Assigns probability P(w) to word sequence w = w1 ,w2,…,wk
• Bayes’ Law provides a history-based model:
P(w1 ,w2,…,wk)
= P(w1) P(w2|w1) P(w3|w1,w2) … P(wk|w1,…,wk-1)
• Cluster histories to reduce number of parameters
June 1999
23
N -gram Language Modeling
• n-gram assumption clusters based on last n-1 words
–
–
–
–
P(wj|w1,…,wj-1) ~ P(wj|wj-n-1,…,wj-2 ,wj-1)
unigrams ~ P(wj)
bigrams ~ P(wj|wj-1)
trigrams ~ P(wj|wj-2 ,wj-1)
• Trigrams often interpolated with bigram and unigram:
P̂( w3 | w1 , w2 )  l3
F ( w3 | w1 , w2 )
 l2
k F (wk | w1 , w2 )
F ( w3 | w2 )
F ( w3 )
 l1
k F (wk | w2 ) k F (wk )
– the li typically estimated by maximum likelihood estimation on held
out data (F(.|.) are relative frequencies)
– many other interpolations exist (another standard is a non-linear
backoff)
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Extended Probabilistic Language Modeling
• Histories can include some indication of semantic topic
– latent-semantic indexing (vector-based information retrieval model)
– topic-spotting and blending of topic-specific models
– dialogue-state specific language models
• Language models can adapt over time
– recent history updates model through re-estimation or blending
– often done by boosting estimates for seen words (triggers)
– new words and/or pronunciations can be added
• Can estimate category tags (syntactic and/or semantic)
– Joint word/category model: P(word1:tag1,…,wordk:tagk)
– example: P(word:tag|History) ~ P(word|tag) P(tag|History)
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Finite State Language Modeling
• Write a finite-state task grammar (with non-recursive CFG)
• Simple Java Speech API example (from user’s guide):
public <Command> = [<Polite>] <Action> <Object> (and <Object>)*;
<Action> = open | close | delete;
<Object> = the window | the file;
<Polite> = please;
• Typically assume that all transitions are equi-probable
• Technology used in most current applications
• Can put semantic actions in the grammar
June 1999
26
Information Theory: Perplexity
• Perplexity is standard model of recognition complexity given
a language model
• Perplexity measures the conditional likelihood of a corpus,
given a language model P(.):
PP( w1 ,..., wN )  P( w1 ,..., wN ) 1/ N
• Roughly the number of equi-probable choices per word
• Typically computed by taking logs and applying historybased Bayesian decomposition:
log 2 PP  1 / N n1 log 2 P(wn | w1 ,..., wn1 )
N
• But lower perplexity doesn’t guarantee better recognition
June 1999
27
Zipf’s Law
• Lexical frequency is inversely proportional to rank
– Frequency(n) = Frequency of n-th most frequent word
– Zipf’s Law: Frequency(Rank) = Frequency(1)/Rank
– Thus:
log Frequency(Rank)  - log Rank
From G.R. Turner’s web site on Zipf’s law:
http://www.btinternet.com/~g.r.turner/ZipfDoc.htm
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28
Vocabulary Acquisition
• IBM personal E-mail corpus of PDB (by R.L. Mercer)
• static coverage is given by most frequent n words
• dynamic coverage is most recent n words
June 1999
Vocabulary
Static
Dynamic Text Size
Coverage Coverage
5,000
92.5
95.5
56,000
10,000
95.9
98.2
240,000
15,000
97.0
99.0
640,000
20,000
97.6
99.5
1,300,000
29
Language HMMs
• Can take HMMs for each word and combine into a single
HMM for the whole language (allows cross-word models)
• Result is usually too large to expand statically in memory
• A two word example is given by:
P(word1|word1)
P(word1)
word1
P(word2|word1)
P(word1|word2)
P(word2)
June 1999
word2
P(word2|word2)
30
Tutorial Overview: Outline
Part I
Part II
• Signal processing
• Speech recognition
• Discourse and dialogue
– Discourse interpretation
– Dialogue management
– Response generation
– acoustic modeling
– language modeling
– decoding
• Semantic interpretation
• Speech synthesis
June 1999
• Dialogue evaluation
• Data collection
31
HMM Decoding
• Decoding Problem is finding best word sequence:
– ArgMax w1,…,wm P(w1,…,wm | a1,…,an)
• Words w1…wm are fully determined by sequences of states
• Many state sequences produce the same words
• The Viterbi assumption:
– the word sequence derived from the most likely path will be the most
likely word sequence (as would be computed over all paths)
i ( s)  Max P( s1 ,..., si | a1 ,..., a i )  Ps (a i ) Max r i 1 (r ) Pr , s
Acoustics
for state s
for input a
June 1999
Max over
previous
states r
32
likelihood
previous
state is r
Transition
probability
from r to s
Visualizing Viterbi Decoding: The Trellis
i ( s)  Max P( s1 ,..., si | a1 ,..., a i )  Ps (a i ) Max r i 1 (r ) Pr , s
input
ai-1
s1
i-1(s1)
s2
i(s2)
P1,2
...
P1,k
s1
i+1(s1)
s2
i+1(s2)
...
June 1999
Pk,1
i(s1)
P1,1
...
time
P2,1
s1
ai+1
...
best
path
i-1(s2)
P1,1
...
s2
ai
sk
sk
sk
i-1(sk)
i(sk)
i+1(sk)
ti-1
ti
ti+1
33
Viterbi Search: Dynamic Programming
Token Passing
• Algorithm:
– Initialize all states with a token with a null history and the likelihood
that it’s a start state
– For each frame ak
• For each token t in state s with probability P(t), history H
– For each state r
» Add new token to s with probability P(t) Ps,r Pr(ak), and
history s.H
• Time synchronous from left to right
• Allows incremental results to be evaluated
June 1999
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Pruning the Search Space
• Entire search space for Viterbi search is much too large
• Solution is to prune tokens for paths whose score is too low
• Typical method is to use:
– histogram: only keep at most n total hypotheses
– beam: only keep hypotheses whose score is a fraction of best score
• Need to balance small n and tight beam to limit search and
minimal search error (good hypotheses falling off beam)
• HMM densities are usually scaled differently than the
discrete likelihoods from the language model
– typical solution: boost language model’s dynamic range, using P(w)n
P(a|w), usually with with n ~ 15
• Often include penalty for each word to favor hypotheses
with fewer words
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N-best Hypotheses and Word Graphs
• Keep multiple tokens and return n-best paths/scores:
–
–
–
–
p1
p2
p3
p4
flights from Boston today
flights from Austin today
flights for Boston to pay
lights for Boston to pay
• Can produce a packed word graph (a.k.a. lattice)
– likelihoods of paths in lattice should equal likelihood for n-best
Austin
flights
from
Boston
today
for
Boston
lights
for
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to
pay
Search-based Decoding
• A* search:
– Compute all initial hypotheses and place in priority queue
– For best hypothesis in queue
• extend by one observation, compute next state score(s) and
place into the queue
• Scoring now compares derivations of different lengths
– would like to, but can’t compute cost to complete until all data is seen
– instead, estimate with simple normalization for length
– usually prune with beam and/or histogram constraints
• Easy to include unbounded amounts of history because no
collapsing of histories as in dynamic programming n-gram
• Also known as stack decoder (priority queue is “stack”)
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Multiple Pass Decoding
• Perform multiple passes, applying successively more finegrained language models
• Can much more easily go beyond finite state or n-gram
• Can use for Viterbi or stack decoding
• Can use word graph as an efficient interface
• Can compute likelihood to complete hypotheses after each
pass and use in next round to tighten beam search
• First pass can even be a free phone decoder without a
word-based language model
June 1999
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Measuring Recognition Accuracy
• Word Error Rate =
Insertions  Deletions  Substitutions
Words
• Example scoring:
– actual utterance: four
six seven nine three three seven
– recognizer:
four oh
six seven five
three
seven
insert
subst
delete
– WER: (1 + 1 + 1)/7 = 43%
• Would like to study concept accuracy
– typically count only errors on content words [application dependent]
– ignore case marking (singular, plural, etc.)
• For word/concept spotting applications:
– recall: percentage of target words (concept) found
– precision: percentage of hypothesized words (concepts) in target
June 1999
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Empirical Recognition Accuracies
•
•
•
•
Cambridge HTK, 1997; multipass HMM w. lattice rescoring
Top Performer in ARPA’s HUB-4: Broadcast News Task
65,000 word vocabulary; Out of Vocabulary: 0.5%
Perplexities:
–
–
–
–
–
word bigram: 240
backoff trigram of 1000 categories: 238
word trigram: 159
word 4-gram: 147
word 4-gram + category trigram: 137
• Word Error Rates:
– clean, read speech: 9.4%
– clean, spontaneous speech: 15.2%
– low fidelity speech: 19.5%
June 1999
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(6.9 million bigrams)
(803K bi, 7.1G tri)
(8.4 million trigrams)
(8.6 million 4-grams)
Empirical Recognition Accuracies (cont’d)
•
•
•
•
•
Lucent 1998, single pass HMM
Typical of real-time telephony performance (low fidelity)
3,000 word vocabulary; Out of Vocabulary: 1.5%
Blended models from customer/operator & customer/system
Perplexities customer/op customer/system
– bigram:
– trigram:
105.8 (27,200)
99.5 (68,500)
32.1 (12,808)
24.4 (25,700)
• Word Error Rate: 23%
• Content Term (single, pair, triple of words) Precision/Recall
– one-word terms:
93.7 / 88.4
– two-word terms:
96.9 / 85.4
– three-word terms: 98.5 / 84.3
June 1999
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Confidence Scoring and Rejection
• Alternative to standard acoustic density scoring
–
–
–
–
compute HMM acoustic score for word(s) in usual way
baseline score for an anti-model
compute hypothesis ratio (Word Score / Baseline Score)
test hypothesis ratio vs. threshold
• Can be applied to:
– free word spotting (given pronunciations)
– (word-by-word) acoustic confidence scoring for later processing
– verbal information verification
• existing info: name, address, social security number
• password
June 1999
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Tutorial Overview: Outline
Part I
Part II
• Signal processing
• Speech recognition
• Discourse and dialogue
– Discourse interpretation
– Dialogue management
– Response generation
– acoustic modeling
– language modeling
– decoding
• Semantic interpretation
• Speech synthesis
June 1999
• Dialogue evaluation
• Data collection
43
Semantic Interpretation: Word Strings
• Content is just words
– System: What is your address?
– User:
fourteen eleven main street
• Can also do concept extraction / keyword(s) spotting
– User:
My address is fourteen eleven main street
• Applications
– template filling
– directory services
– information retrieval
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Semantic Interpretation: Pattern-Based
• Simple (typically regular) patterns specify content
• ATIS (Air Traffic Information System) Task:
– System: What are your travel plans?
– User:
[On Monday], I’m going [from Boston] [to San Francisco].
– Content: [DATE=Monday, ORIGIN=Boston, DESTINATION=SFO]
• Can combine content-extraction and language modeling
– but can be too restrictive as a language model
• Java Speech API: (curly brackets show semantic ‘actions’)
public <command> = <action> [<object>] [<polite>];
<action> = open {OP} | close {CL} | move {MV};
<object> = [<this_that_etc>] window | door;
<this_that_etc> = a | the | this | that | the current;
<polite> = please | kindly;
• Can be generated and updated on the fly (eg. Web Apps)
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Semantic Interpretation: Parsing
• In general case, have to uncover who did what to whom:
–
–
–
–
System: What would you like me to do next?
User: Put the block in the box on Platform 1. [ambiguous]
System: How can I help you?
User: Where is A Bug’s Life playing in Summit?
• Requires some kind of parsing to produce relations:
– Who did what to whom:
?(where(present(in(Summit,play(BugsLife)))))
– This kind of representation often used for machine translation
• Often transferred to flatter frame-based representation:
– Utterance type: where-question
– Movie: A Bug’s Life
– Town: Summit
June 1999
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Robustness and Partiality
• Controlled Speech
– limited task vocabulary; limited task grammar
• Spontaneous Speech
– Can have high out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rate
– Includes restarts, word fragments, omissions, phrase fragments,
disagreements, and other disfluencies
– Contains much grammatical variation
– Causes high word error-rate in recognizer
• Parsing is often partial, allowing:
– omission
– parsing fragments
June 1999
47
Tutorial Overview: Outline
Part I
Part II
• Signal processing
• Speech recognition
• Discourse and dialogue
– Discourse interpretation
– Dialogue management
– Response generation
– acoustic modeling
– language modeling
– decoding
• Semantic interpretation
• Speech synthesis
June 1999
• Dialogue evaluation
• Data collection
48
Recorded Prompts
• The simplest (and most common) solution is to record
prompts spoken by a (trained) human
• Produces human quality voice
• Limited by number of prompts that can be recorded
• Can be extended by limited cut-and-paste or template filling
June 1999
49
Speech Synthesis
• Rule-based Synthesis
– Uses linguistic rules (+/- training) to generate features
– Example: DECTalk
• Concatenative Synthesis
–
–
–
–
June 1999
Record basic inventory of sounds
Retrieve appropriate sequence of units at run time
Concatenate and adjust durations and pitch
Waveform synthesis
50
Diphone and Polyphone Synthesis
•
•
•
•
Phone sequences capture co-articulation
Cut speech in positions that minimize context contamination
Need single phones, diphones and sometimes triphones
Reduce number collected by
– phonotactic constraints
– collapsing in cases of no co-articulation
• Data Collection Methods
– Collect data from a single (professional) speaker
– Select text with maximal coverage (typically with greedy algorithm),
or
– Record minimal pairs in desired contexts (real words or nonsense)
June 1999
51
Duration Modeling
Must generate segments with the appropriate duration
• Segmental Identity
– /ai/ in like twice as long as /I/ in lick
• Surrounding Segments
– vowels longer following voiced fricatives than voiceless stops
• Syllable Stress
– onsets and nuclei of stressed syllables longer than in unstressed
• Word “importance”
– word accent with major pitch movement lengthens
• Location of Syllable in Word
– word ending longer than word starting longer than word internal
• Location of the Syllable in the Phrase
– phrase final syllables longer than same syllable in other positions
June 1999
52
Intonation: Tone Sequence Models
• Functional Information can be encoded via tones:
–
–
–
–
given/new information (information status)
contrastive stress
phrasal boundaries (clause structure)
dialogue act (statement/question/command)
• Tone Sequence Models
– F0 contours generated from phonologically distinctive tones/pitch
accents which are locally independent
– generate a sequence of tonal targets and fit with signal processing
June 1999
53
Intonation for Function
• ToBI (Tone and Break Index) System, is one example:
–
–
–
–
Pitch Accent
* (H*, L*, H*+L, H+L*, L*+H, L+H*)
Phrase Accent - (H-, L-)
Boundary Tone % (H%, L%)
Intonational Phrase
<Pitch Accent>+ <Phrase Accent> <Boundary Tone>
statement
vs. question
example:
source: Multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis, R. Sproat, ed., Kluwer, 1998
June 1999
54
Text Markup for Synthesis
• Bell Labs TTS Markup
– r(0.9) L*+H(0.8) Humpty L*+H(0.8) Dumpty r(0.85) L*(0.5) sat on a
H*(1.2) wall.
– Tones:
Tone(Prominence)
– Speaking Rate: r(Rate) and pauses
– Top Line (highest pitch); Reference Line (reference pitch); Base
Line (lowest pitch)
• SABLE is an emerging standard extending SGML
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/sable.html
– marks: emphasis(#), break(#), pitch(base/mid/range,#), rate(#),
volume(#), semanticMode(date/time/email/URL/...),
speaker(age,sex)
– Implemented in Festival Synthesizer (free for research, etc.):
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival.html
June 1999
55
Intonation in Bell Labs TTS
• Generate a sequence of F0 targets for synthesis
• Example:
– We were away a year ago.
– phones: w E w R & w A & y E r & g O
– Default Declarative intonation: (H%) H* L- L% [question: L* H- H%]
source: Multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis, R. Sproat, ed., Kluwer, 1998
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Signal Processing for Speech Synthesis
• Diphones recorded in one context must be generated in
other contexts
• Features are extracted from recorded units
• Signal processing manipulates features to smooth
boundaries where units are concatenated
• Signal processing modifies signal via ‘interpolation’
– intonation
– duration
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The Source-Filter Model of Synthesis
• Model of features to be extracted and fitted
• Excitation or Voicing Source(s) to model sound source
–
–
–
–
–
standard wave of glottal pulses for voiced sounds
randomly varying noise for unvoiced sounds
modification of airflow due to lips, etc.
high frequency (F0 rate), quasi-periodic, choppy
modeled with vector of glottal waveform patterns in voiced regions
• Acoustic Filter(s)
– shapes the frequency character of vocal tract and radiation character
at the lips
– relatively slow (samples around 5ms suffice) and stationary
– modeled with LPC (linear predictive coding)
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Barge-in
• Technique to allow speaker to interrupt the system’s speech
• Combined processing of input signal and output signal
• Signal detector runs looking for speech start and endpoints
– tests a generic speech model against noise model
– typically cancels echoes created by outgoing speech
• If speech is detected:
– Any synthesized or recorded speech is cancelled
– Recognition begins and continues until end point is detected
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Speech Application Programming Interfaces
•
•
•
•
Abstract from recognition/synthesis engines
Recognizer and synthesizer loading
Acoustic and grammar model loading (dynamic updates)
Recognition
– online
– n-best or lattice
• Synthesis
– markup
– barge in
• Acoustic control
– telephony interface
– microphone/speaker interface
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Speech API Examples
• SAPI: Microsoft Speech API (rec&synth)
– communicates through COM objects
– instances: most systems implement all or some of this (Dragon, IBM,
Lucent, L&H, etc.)
• JSAPI: Java Speech API (rec & synth)
– communicates through Java events (like GUI)
– concurrency through threads
– instances: IBM ViaVoice (rec), L&H (synth)
• (J)HAPI: (Java) HTK API (recognition)
– communicates through C or Java port of C interface
– eg: Entropics Cambridge Research Lab’s HMM Tool Kit (HTK)
• Galaxy (rec & synth)
– communicates through a production system scripting language
– MIT System, ported by MITRE for DARPA Communicator
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Tutorial Overview: Outline
Part I
Part II
• Signal processing
• Speech recognition
• Discourse and dialogue
– Discourse interpretation
– Dialogue management
– Response generation
– acoustic modeling
– language modeling
– decoding
• Semantic interpretation
• Speech synthesis
June 1999
• Dialogue evaluation
• Data collection
62
Discourse & Dialogue Processing
• Discourse interpretation:
– Understand what the user really intends by interpreting utterances in
context
• Dialogue management:
– Determine system goals in response to user utterances based on
user intention
• Response generation:
– Generate natural language utterances to achieve the selected goals
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Discourse Interpretation
• Goal: understand what the user really intends
• Example: Can you move it?
– What does “it” refer to?
– Is the utterance intended as a simple yes-no query or a request to
perform an action?
• Issues addressed:
– Reference resolution
– Intention recognition
• Interpret user utterances in context
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Reference Resolution
U: Where is A Bug’s Life playing in Summit?
S: A Bug’s Life is playing at the Summit theater.
U: When is it playing there?
S: It’s playing at 2pm, 5pm, and 8pm.
U: I’d like 1 adult and 2 children for the first show.
How much would that cost?
• Knowledge sources:
– Domain knowledge
– Discourse knowledge
– World knowledge
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Reference Resolution: In Theory
• Focus stacks:
– Maintain recent objects in stack
– Select objects that satisfy semantic/pragmatic constraints starting
from top of stack
– May take into account discourse structure
• Centering:
– Backward-looking center (Cb): object connecting the current
sentence with the previous sentence
– Forward-looking centers (Cf): potential Cb of the next sentence
– Rule-based filtering & ranking of objects for pronoun resolution
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Reference Resolution: In Practice
• Non-existent: does not allow the use of anaphoric
references
• Allows only simple references:
– utilizes the focus stack reference resolution mechanism
– does not take into account discourse structure information
• Example:
U: Where is A Bug’s Life playing in
Summit?
Summit
A Bug’s Life
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S: A Bug’s Life is playing at the
Summit theater.
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Summit
theater
A Bug’s Life
U: When is it playing there?
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Intention Recognition
B: I have to wash my hair.
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70
A: Would you like to go to the hairdresser?
• B’s utterance should be interpreted as an acceptance of A’s
proposal.
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A: What’s that smell around here?
• B’s utterance should be interpreted as an answer to A’s
question.
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A: Would you be interested in going out to dinner
tonight?
• B’s utterance should be interpreted as a rejection of A’s
proposal.
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Intention Recognition (Cont’d)
• Goal: to recognize the intent of each user utterance as one
(or more) of a set of dialogue acts based on context
• Sample dialogue actions:
– Verbmobil
– Switchboard DAMSL
• Greet/Thank/Bye
• Conventional-closing
• Suggest
• Statement-(non-)opinion
• Accept/Reject
• Agree/Accept
• Confirm
• Acknowledgment
• Yes-No-Question/Yes-Answer • Clarify-Query/Answer
• Give-Reason
• Non-verbal
• Deliberate
• Abandoned
• On-going standardization efforts (Discourse Resource
Initiative)
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Intention Recognition: In Theory
• Knowledge sources:
– Overall dialogue goals
– Orthographic features, e.g.:
• punctuation
• cue words/phrases: “but”, “furthermore”, “so”
• transcribed words: “would you please”, “I want to”
– Dialogue history, i.e., previous dialogue act types
– Dialogue structure, e.g.:
• subdialogue boundaries
• dialogue topic changes
– Prosodic features of utterance: duration, pause, F0, speaking rate
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Intention Recognition: In Theory (Cont’d)
• Finite-state dialogue grammar:
– e.g.
S / Greet
U / Question S / Answer
U / Bye
U / Question
• Plan-based discourse understanding:
– Recipes: templates for performing actions
– Inference rules: to construct plausible plans
• Empirical methods:
– Probabilistic dialogue act classifiers: HMMs
– Rule-based dialogue act recognition: CART, Transformation-based
learning
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Intention Recognition: In Practice
• Makes assumptions about (high-level) task-specific
intentions: e.g.,
– Call routing: giving destination information
– ATIS: requesting flight information
– Movie information system: movie showtime or theater playlist
information
• Does not allow user-initiated complex dialogue acts, e.g.
confirmation, clarification, or indirect responses
S1: What’s your account number?
U1: Is that the number on my ATM card?
S2: Would you like to transfer $1,500 from savings to checking?
U2: If I have enough in savings.
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Intention Recognition: In Practice (Cont’d)
• User utterances can play one of two roles:
– Identify one of a set of possible task intentions
– Provide necessary information for performing a task
• Based on either keywords in an utterance or its
syntactic/semantic representation
• Maps keywords or representations to intentions using:
– Template matching
– Probabilistic model
– Vector-based similarity measures
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Intention Recognition: Example
U: What time is A Bug’s Life playing at the Summit
theater?
• Using keyword extraction and vector-based similarity
measures:
– Intention: Ask-Reference: _time
– Movie: A Bug’s Life
– Theater: the Summit quadplex
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Tutorial Overview: Outline
Part I
Part II
• Signal processing
• Speech recognition
• Discourse and dialogue
– Discourse interpretation
– Dialogue management
– Response generation
– acoustic modeling
– language modeling
– decoding
• Semantic interpretation
• Speech synthesis
June 1999
• Dialogue evaluation
• Data collection
80
Dialogue Management: Motivating Examples
• Dialogue 1:
S: Would you like movie showtime or theater playlist
information?
U: Movie showtime.
S: What movie do you want showtime information about?
U: Saving Private Ryan.
S: At what theater do you want to see Saving Private
Ryan?
U: Paramount theater.
S: Saving Private Ryan is not playing at the Paramount
theater.
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DM: Motivating Examples (Cont’d)
• Dialogue 2:
S: How may I help you?
U: When is Saving Private Ryan playing?
S: For what theater?
U: The Paramount theater.
S: Saving Private Ryan is not playing at the
Paramount theater, but it’s playing at the Madison
theater at 3:00, 5:30, 8:00, and 10:30.
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DM: Motivating Examples (Cont’d)
• Dialogue 3:
S: How may I help you?
U: When is Saving Private Ryan playing?
S: For what theater?
U: The Paramount theater.
S: Saving Private Ryan is playing at the Fairmont
theater at 6:00 and 8:30.
U: I wanted to know about the Paramount theater, not
the Fairmont theater.
S: Saving Private Ryan is not playing at the
Paramount theater, but it’s playing at the Madison
theater at 3:00, 5:30, 8:00, and 10:30.
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Comparison of Sample Dialogues
• Dialogue 1:
• Dialogue 2:
– System-initiative
– Implicit
confirmation
– Merely informs
user of failed query
– Mechanical
– Least efficient
June 1999
– Mixed-initiative
– No confirmation
– Suggests
alternative when
query fails
– More natural
– Most efficient
84
• Dialogue 3:
– Mixed-initiative
– No confirmation
– Suggests
alternative when
query fails
– More natural
– Moderately
efficient
Dialogue Management
• Goal: determine what to accomplish in response to
user utterances, e.g.:
–
–
–
–
–
Answer user question
Solicit further information
Confirm/Clarify user utterance
Notify invalid query
Notify invalid query and suggest alternative
• Interface between user/language processing
components and system knowledge base
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Dialogue Management (Cont’d)
• Main design issues:
– Functionality: how much should the system do?
– Process: how should the system do them?
• Affected by:
– Task complexity: how hard the task is
– Dialogue complexity: what dialogue phenomena are allowed
• Affects:
– robustness
– naturalness
– perceived intelligence
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Task Complexity
• Application dependent
• Examples:
Call
Routing
Weather
Information
Automatic
Banking
ATIS
Simple
Complex
• Directly affects:
– Types and quantity of system knowledge
– Complexity of system’s reasoning abilities
June 1999
Travel
University
Planning Course
Advisement
87
Dialogue Complexity
• Determines what can be talked about:
– The task only
– Subdialogues: e.g., clarification, confirmation
– The dialogue itself: meta-dialogues
• Could you hold on for a minute?
• What was that click? Did you hear it?
• Determines who can talk about them:
– System only
– User only
– Both participants
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Dialogue Management: Functionality
• Determines the set of possible goals that the system may
select at each turn
• At the task level, dictated by task complexity
• At the dialogue level, determined by system designer in
terms of dialogue complexity:
– Are subdialogues allowed?
– Are meta-dialogues allowed?
– Only by the system, by the user, or by both agents?
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DM Functionality: In Theory
• Task complexity: moderate to complex
– Travel planning
– University course advisement
• Dialogue complexity:
– System/user-initiated complex subdialogues
• Embedded negotiation subdialogues
• Expressions of doubt
– Meta-dialogues
– Multiple dialogue threads
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DM Functionality: In Practice
• Task complexity: simple to moderate
– Call routing
– Weather information query
– Train schedule inquiry
• Dialogue complexity:
– About task only
– Limited system-initiated subdialogues
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Dialogue Management: Process
• Determines how the system will go about selecting among
the possible goals
• At the dialogue level, determined by system designer in
terms of initiative strategies:
– System-initiative: system always has control, user only responds to
system questions
– User-initiative: user always has control, system passively answers
user questions
– Mixed-initiative: control switches between system and user using
fixed rules
– Variable-initiative: control switches between system and user
dynamically based on participant roles, dialogue history, etc.
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DM Process: In Theory
• Initiative strategies:
– Mixed-initiative
– Variable-initiative
• Mechanisms for modeling initiative:
– Planning and reasoning
– Theorem proving
– Belief modeling
• Knowledge sources for modeling initiative:
–
–
–
–
June 1999
System beliefs, user beliefs, and mutual beliefs
System domain knowledge
Dialogue history
User preferences
93
DM Process: In Practice
• Initiative strategies:
–
–
–
–
User-initiative
System-initiative
Mixed-initiative
Variable-initiative
• Mechanisms for modeling initiative:
– System and mixed-initiative: finite-state machines
– Variable-initiative: evidential model for computing initiative
• Knowledge sources:
– Dialogue history: e.g. user fails to make progress in task
– Participant roles: advisor/advisee vs. collaborators
– Features of current utterance: e.g.: ambiguous utterance,
underspecified utterance
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Dialogue Management: Summary
• In theory:
– Focuses on developing algorithms for addressing difficult dialogue
phenomena in complex tasks
• In practice:
– Focuses on developing robust, real-time dialogue strategies for
handling common dialogue phenomena in simpler tasks
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Dialogue Management: Example
• System for providing movie showtime and theater playlist
information
• Functionality:
– Task: provide simple movie information
– Dialogue: allow system-initiated subdialogues
• Process:
– Variable-initiative
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Dialogue Management Example (Cont’d)
<U has task & dialogue initiative>
U: When is Antz playing at the Fairmont theater?
<S has dialogue initiative (low score for theater)>
<goal: confirm Paramount theater>
S: Did you say the Paramount theater?
U: No, the Fairmont theater.
<S has no initiative>
<goal: answer user question>
S: Antz is playing at the Fairmont theater at 7pm.
U: When is it playing at the Summit theater?
<S has task & dialogue initiative>
<goal: notify failure & suggest alternative>
S: Antz is not playing at the Summit theater, but it’s
playing at the AMC theater in Summit at 8pm.
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Tutorial Overview: Outline
Part I
Part II
• Signal processing
• Speech recognition
• Discourse and dialogue
– Discourse interpretation
– Dialogue management
– Response generation
– acoustic modeling
– language modeling
– decoding
• Semantic interpretation
• Speech synthesis
June 1999
• Dialogue evaluation
• Data collection
98
Response Generation
U: Is Saving Private Ryan playing at the Chatham
cinema?
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S: No, it’s not.
• S provides elliptical response
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S: No, Saving Private Ryan is not playing at the Chatham
cinema.
• S provides full response (which provides grounding
information)
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S: No, Saving Private Ryan is not playing at the Chatham
cinema; the theater’s under renovation.
• S provides full response and supporting evidence
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Response Generation (Cont’d)
• Goal: generate natural language utterances to achieve
goal(s) selected by the dialogue manager
• Issues:
– Content selection: determining what to say
– Surface realization: determining how to say it
• Generation gap: discrepancy between the actual output of
the content selection process and the expected input of the
surface realization process
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Content Selection
• Goal: determine the propositional content of utterances to
achieve goal(s)
• Examples:
– Antz is not playing at the Maplewood theater; [Nucleus]
– Would you like the suite? [Nucleus]
– Can you get the groceries from the car? [Nucleus]
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– the theater’s under renovation. (evidence) [Satellite]
– It’s the same price as the regular room. (motivation) [Satellite]
– The key is on the dryer. (enablement) [Satellite]
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Content Selection: In Theory
• Knowledge sources:
–
–
–
–
Domain knowledge base
User beliefs
User model: user characteristics, preferences, etc.
Dialogue history
• Content selection mechanisms:
– Schemas: patterns of predicates
– Rule-based generation
– Plan-based generation:
• Recipes: templates for performing actions
• Planner: to construct plans for given goal
– Case-based reasoning
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Content Selection: In Practice
• Knowledge sources:
– Domain knowledge base
– Dialogue history
• Pre-determined content selection strategies:
– Nucleus only, no satellite information
– Nucleus + fixed satellite
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Surface Realization
• Goal: determine how the selected content will be conveyed
by natural language utterances
• Examples:
–
–
–
–
Antz is showing (shown) at the Maplewood theater.
The Maplewood theater is showing Antz.
It is at the Maplewood theater that Antz is shown.
Antz, that’s what’s being shown at the Maplewood theater.
• Issues:
– Clausal structure construction
– Lexical selection
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Surface Realization: In Theory
• Typical surface generator requires as input:
– Semantic representation to be realized
– Clausal structure for generated utterance
• Surface realization component utilizes a grammar to
generate utterance that conveys the given semantic
representation
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Surface Realization: In Practice
• Canned utterances:
– Pre-determined utterances for goals; e.g.:
• Greetings: Hello, this is the ABC bank’s operator.
• Repeat: Could you please repeat your request?
– Facilitates pre-recorded prompts for speech output
• Template-based generation:
– Templates for goals; e.g.:
• Notification: Your call is being transferred to X.
• Inform: A,B,C,D, and E are playing at the F theater.
• Clarify: Did you say X or Y?
– Needs cut-and-paste of pre-recorded segments or full TTS system
June 1999
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Tutorial Overview: Outline
Part I
Part II
• Signal processing
• Speech recognition
• Discourse and dialogue
– Discourse interpretation
– Dialogue management
– Response generation
– acoustic modeling
– language modeling
– decoding
• Semantic interpretation
• Speech synthesis
June 1999
• Dialogue evaluation
• Data collection
111
Dialogue Evaluation
• Goal: determine how “well” a dialogue system performs
• Main difficulties:
– No strict right or wrong answers
– Difficult to determine what features make a dialogue system better
than another
– Difficult to select metrics that contribute to the overall “goodness” of
the system
– Difficult to determine how the metrics compensate for one another
– Expensive to collect new data for evaluating incremental
improvement of systems
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Dialogue Evaluation (Cont’d)
• System-initiative, explicit
confirmation
–
–
–
–
–
June 1999
• Mixed-initiative, no
confirmation
–
–
–
–
–
better task success rate
lower WER
longer dialogues
fewer recovery subdialogues
less natural
113
lower task success rate
higher WER
shorter dialogues
more recovery subdialogues
more natural
Dialogue Evaluation Paradigms
• Evaluating the end result only:
– Reference answers
• Evaluating both the end result and the process toward it:
– Evaluation metrics
– Performance functions
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Evaluation Paradigms: Reference Answers
• Evaluates the task success rate only
• Suitable for query-answering systems for which a correct
answer can be defined for each query
• For each query:
– Obtain answer from dialogue system
– Compare with reference answer
– Score system performance
• Advantage: simple
• Disadvantage: ignores many other important factors that
contribute to quality of dialogue systems
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Evaluation Paradigms: Evaluation Metrics
• Different metrics for evaluating different components of a
dialogue system:
– Speech recognizer: word error rate / word accuracy
– Understanding component: attribute value matrix
– Dialogue manager:
• appropriateness of system responses
• error recovery abilities
– Overall system:
• task success
• average number of turns
• elapsed time
• turn correction ratio
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Paradigms: Evaluation Metrics (Cont’d)
• Advantage:
– Takes into account the process toward completing the task
• Limitations:
– Difficult to determine how different metrics compensate for one
another
– Metrics may not be independent of one another
– Does not generalize across domains and tasks
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Paradigms: Performance Functions
• PARADISE [Walker et al.]: derives performance functions
using both task-based and dialogue-based metrics
• User satisfaction:
– Maximize task success
– Minimize costs:
• Efficiency measures: e.g., number of utterances, elapsed time
• Qualitative measures: e.g., repair ratio, inappropriate utt. ratio
• Performance function derivation:
– Obtain user satisfaction ratings (questionnaire)
– Obtain values for various metrics (automatic or manual)
– Apply multiple linear regression to derive a function relating user
satisfaction and various cost factors, e.g.,
Perf  .21* TSR  .47 * MR  .15 * ET
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Paradigms: Performance Functions (Cont’d)
• Advantages:
– Allows for comparison of dialogue systems performing different tasks
– Specifies relative contributions of cost factors to overall performance
– Can be used to make predictions about future versions of the
dialogue system
• Disadvantages:
– Data collection cost for deriving performance function is high
– Cost for deriving performance function for multiple systems to draw
general conclusions is high
June 1999
119
Tutorial Overview: Outline
Part I
Part II
• Signal processing
• Speech recognition
• Discourse and dialogue
– Discourse interpretation
– Dialogue management
– Response generation
– acoustic modeling
– language modeling
– decoding
• Semantic interpretation
• Speech synthesis
June 1999
• Dialogue evaluation
• Data collection
120
Data Collection: Wizard of Oz Paradigm
• Setup for initial data collection:
– User communicates with “system” through telephone (speech) or
keyboard (text)
– “System” is actually a human, typically given instructions on how to
behave like a system
– Users are typically given tasks to perform in the target domain
– Subjects are the users and the “system” can be played by one
person
– Dialogues between “system” and user are recorded and transcribed
• Setup for intermediate system evaluation:
– Use actual running system, with wizard supervision
– Wizard can override undesirable system behavior, e.g., correct ASR
errors
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Data Collection: Wizard of Oz (Cont’d)
• Features of collected data:
– Typically much less complex than actual human-human dialogues
performing the same tasks
– Captures how humans behave when they talk to computers
– Captures variations among different subjects in both language and
approach when performing the same tasks
• Use of collected data:
– Particularly useful for designing the interpretation component of the
dialogue system
– Useful for training purposes for ASR systems
– May also be helpful for designing the dialogue management and
response generation components
June 1999
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Summary
Signal
Processing
Semantic
Interpretation
Speech
Recognition
Discourse
Interpretation
Dialogue
Management
Speech
Synthesis
June 1999
Response
Generation
123
Publicly Available Telephone Demos
• Nuance
http://www.nuance.com/demo/index.html
– Banking: 1-650-847-7438
– Travel Planning: 1-650-847-7427
– Stock Quotes: 1-650-847-7423
• SpeechWorks http://www.speechworks.com/demos/demos.htm
– Banking: 1-888-729-3366
– Stock Trading: 1-800-786-2571
• MIT Spoken Language Systems Laboratory
http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu/sls/whatwedo/applications.html
– Travel Plans (Pegasus): 1-877-648-8255
– Weather (Jupiter): 1-888-573-8255
• IBM http://www.software.ibm.com/speech/overview/business/demo.html
– Mutual Funds, Name Dialing: 1-877-VIA-VOICE
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