This book focuses on dialog from a varied combination of fields: Linguistics, Philosophy of Language and Computation. It builds on the hypothesis that meaning in human communication arises at the discourse level rather than at the word level. The book offers a complex analytical framework and integration of the central areas of research around human communication. The content revolves around meaning but it also gives evidence of the connection among different points of view. Besides discussing issues of general interest to the field, the book triggers theoretical argumentation that is currently under scientific discussion. It examines such topics as immanent reasoning joined with Recanati's lekta and free enrichment, challenges of internet conversation, inner dialogs, cognition and language, and the relation between assertion and denial. It proposes a dialogical framework for intra-negotiation and gives a geolinguistic perspective on spoken discourse. Finally, it examines dialog and abduction and sheds light on a generation of dialog contexts by means of multimodal logic applied to speech acts.

For professional speech researchers, there is a rich technical literature covering many years of primary research in speech. However, this literature is not necessarily applicable to the needs of business people, application developers, and students who are interested in learning about the practical uses of speech technology. On the other hand, while existing introductory resources cover the basic mechanics of development of application development as well as aspects of the voice user interface, they don’t go far enough in dealing with the details that have to be taken into account to make spoken dialog systems successful in practice. What’s missing is information in between the in-depth technical literature and the more introductory development resources. The goal of this book is to provide information for anyone who wants to take the next step beyond the basics of current speech applications but isn’t yet ready to dive into the technical literature. It is hoped that this book will help project managers, application developers, and students gain a fuller and more complete understanding of spoken dialog technology and the practical aspects of developing and deploying spoken dialog applications.

User models have recently attracted much research interest in the field of artificial intelligence dialog systems. It has become evident that flexible user-oriented dialog behavior of such systems can be achieved only if the system has access to a model of the user containing assumptions about his/her background knowledge as well as his/her goals and plans in consulting the system. Research in the field of user models investigates how such assumptions can be automatically created, represented and exploited by the system in the course of an "on-line" interaction with the user. The communication medium in this interaction need not necessarily be a natural language, such as English or German. Formal interaction languages are also permit ted. The emphasis is placed on systems with natural language input and output, however. A dozen major and several more minor user modeling systems have been de signed and implemented in the last decade, mostly in the context of natural-language dialog systems. The goal of UM86, the first international workshop on user model ing, was to bring together the researchers working on these projects so that results could be discussed and analyzed, and hopefully general insights be found, that could prove useful for future research. The meeting took place in Maria Laach, a small village some 40 miles south of Bonn, West Germany. 25 prominent researchers were invited to participate.

Before designing a speech application system, three key questions have to be answered: who will use it, why and how often? This book focuses on these high-level questions and gives a criteria of when and how to design speech systems. After an introduction, the state-of-the-art in modern voice user interfaces is displayed. The book goes on to evolve criteria for designing and evaluating successful voice user interfaces. Trends in this fast growing area are also presented.

In Monitoring Adaptive Spoken Dialog Systems, authors Alexander Schmitt and Wolfgang Minker investigate statistical approaches that allow for recognition of negative dialog patterns in Spoken Dialog Systems (SDS). The presented stochastic methods allow a flexible, portable and accurate use. Beginning with the foundations of machine learning and pattern recognition, this monograph examines how frequently users show negative emotions in spoken dialog systems and develop novel approaches to speech-based emotion recognition using hybrid approach to model emotions. The authors make use of statistical methods based on acoustic, linguistic and contextual features to examine the relationship between the interaction flow and the occurrence of emotions using non-acted recordings several thousand real users from commercial and non-commercial SDS. Additionally, the authors present novel statistical methods that spot problems within a dialog based on interaction patterns. The approaches enable future SDS to offer more natural and robust interactions. This work provides insights, lessons and inspiration for future research and development, not only for spoken dialog systems, but for data-driven approaches to human-machine interaction in general.

This book covers state-of-the-art topics on the practical implementation of Spoken Dialog Systems and intelligent assistants in everyday applications. It presents scientific achievements in language processing that result in the development of successful applications and addresses general issues regarding the advances in Spoken Dialog Systems with applications in robotics, knowledge access and communication. Emphasis is placed on the following topics: speaker/language recognition, user modeling / simulation, evaluation of dialog system, multi-modality / emotion recognition from speech, speech data mining, language resource and databases, machine learning for spoken dialog systems and educational and healthcare applications.

Advances in Commercial Deployment of Spoken Dialog Systems covers the peculiarities of commercial deployments of spoken dialog systems, from the tools, standards, and design principles to build them, the infrastructure to deploy them, techniques to monitor, evaluate, and analyze them, and, most importantly, effective strategies to adapt, tune, and optimize them. The book shows to what extent academic spoken dialog system research converges with real-world applications. This academic and practical synergy can be leveraged to build successful and robust spoken dialog applications that are useful when dealing with the dynamics of the ever-changing future user.

This volume contains invited and contributed papers presented at the NATO Advanced study Insti tute on "Recent Advances in Speech Understanding and Dialog systems" held in Bad Windsheim, Federal Republic of Germany, July 5 to July 18, 1987. It is divided into the three parts Speech coding and Segmentation, Word Recognition, and Linguistic Processing. Although this can only be a rough organization showing some overlap, the editors felt that it most naturally represents the bottom-up strategy of speech understanding and, therefore, should be useful for the reader. Part 1, SPEECH CODING AND SEGMENTATION, contains 4 invited and 14 contributed papers. The first invited paper summarizes basic properties of speech signals, reviews coding schemes, and describes a particular solution which guarantees high speech quality at low data rates. The second and third invited papers are concerned with acoustic-phonetic decoding. Techniques to integrate knowledge sources into speech recognition systems are presented and demonstrated by experimental systems. The fourth invited paper gives an overview of approaches for using prosodic knowledge in automatic speech recogni tion systems, and a method for assigning a stress score to every syllable in an utterance of German speech is reported in a contributed paper. A set of contributed papers treats the problem of automatic segmentation, and several authors successfully apply knowledge-based methods for interpreting speech signals and spectrograms. The last three papers investigate phonetic models, Markov models and fuzzy quantization techniques and provide a transi tion to Part 2 .

This book compiles and presents a synopsis on current global research efforts to push forward the state of the art in dialogue technologies, including advances to the classical problems of dialogue management, language generation, question answering, human–robot interaction, chatbots design and evaluation, as well as topics related to the human nature of the conversational phenomena such as humour, social context, specific applications for e-health, understanding, and awareness

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems, IWDS 2010, held in Gotemba, Japan, in October 2010. The 22 session papers presented together with 2 invited keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers deal with topics around Spoken Dialogue Systems for Ambient Environment and discuss common issues of theories, applications, evaluation, limitations, general tools and techniques.