Ramon Lopez Cozar Delgado & Masahiro Araki 
Spoken, Multilingual and Multimodal Dialogue Systems 
Development and Assessment

Dialogue systems are a very appealing technology with an
extraordinary future. Spoken, Multilingual and Multimodal
Dialogues Systems: Development and Assessment addresses the
great demand for information about the development of advanced
dialogue systems combining speech with other modalities under a
multilingual framework. It aims to give a systematic overview of
dialogue systems and recent advances in the practical application
of spoken dialogue systems.

Spoken Dialogue Systems are computer-based systems developed to
provide information and carry out simple tasks using speech as the
interaction mode. Examples include travel information and
reservation, weather forecast information, directory information
and product order. Multimodal Dialogue Systems aim to overcome the
limitations of spoken dialogue systems which use speech as the only
communication means, while Multilingual Systems allow interaction
with users that speak different languages.

* Presents a clear snapshot of the structure of a standard
dialogue system, by addressing its key components in the context of
multilingual and multimodal interaction and the assessment of
spoken, multilingual and multimodal systems

* In addition to the fundamentals of the technologies employed,
the development and evaluation of these systems are described

* Highlights recent advances in the practical application of
spoken dialogue systems

This comprehensive overview is a must for graduate students and
academics in the fields of speech recognition, speech synthesis,
speech processing, language, and human-computer interaction
technolgy. It will also prove to be a valuable resource to system
developers working in these areas.

Table of Content

Preface.

1. Introduction to Dialogue Systems.

1.1 Human-Computer Interaction and Speech Processing.

1.2 Spoken Dialogue Systems.

1.3 Multimodal Dialogue Systems.

1.4 Multilingual Dialogue Systems.

1.5 Dialogue Systems Referenced in This Book.

1.6 Area Organisation and Research Directions.

1.7 Overview of the Book.

1.8 Further Reading.

2. Technologies Employed to Set Up Dialogue Systems.

2.1 Input Interface.

2.2 Multimodal Processing.

2.3 Output Interface.

2.4 Summary.

2.5 Further Reading.

3. Multimodal Dialogue Systems.

3.1 Benefits of Multimodal Interaction.

3.2 Development of Multimodal Dialogue Systems.

3.3 Summary.

3.5 Further Reading.

4. Multilingual Dialogue Systems.

4.1 Implications of Multilinguality in the Architecture of
Dialogue Systems.

4.2 Multilingual Dialogue Systems Based on Interlingua.

4.3 Multilingual Dialogue Systems Based on Web Applications.

4.4 Summary.

4.5 Further Reading.

5. Dialogue Annotation, Modelling and Management.

5.1 Dialogue Annotation.

5.2 Dialogue Modelling.

5.3 Dialogue Management.

5.4 Implications of Multimodality in the Dialogue
Management.

5.5 Implications of Mulitlinguality in the Dialogue
Management.

5.6 Implications of Task Independency in the Dialogue
Management.

5.7 Summary.

5.8 Further Reading.

6. Development Tools.

6.1 Tools for Spoken and Multilingual Dialogue Systems.

6.2 Standards and Tools for Multimodal Dialogue Systems.

6.3 Summary.

6.4 Further Reading.

7. Assessment.

7.1 Overview of Evaluation Techniques.

7.2 Evaluation of Spoken and Multilingual Dialogue Systems.

7.3 Evaluation of Multimodal Dialogue Systems.

7.4 Summary.

7.5 Further Reading.

Appendix A: Basic Tutorial on Voice XML.

Appendix B: Multimodal Databases.

Appendix C: Coding Schemes for Multimodal Resources.

Appendix D: URLs of Interest.

Appendix E: List of Abbreviations.

References.

Index.

About the author

Ramón López-Cózar Delgado is Associate
Professor in the Department of Languages and Computer Systems,
Computer Science Faculty, Granada University, Spain. He has
published over 30 papers in international journals and conferences
concerned with dialogue systems. He is member of the COST
Action 278 ‘Spoken Language Interaction in
Telecommunications’

Masahiro Araki is an Associate Professor at Department of
Electronics and Information Science, Kyoto Institute of Technology.
His current interests are spoken dialogue processing and artificial
intelligence. He is a member of ACL and ISCA.

João P. Neto is Assistant Professor at Instituto
Superior Técnico (IST), Technical University of Lisbon in
signal theory, discrete signal processing, control systems and
neural networks. His research interests focus on spoken, multimodal
and multilingual dialogue systems, speech recognition and
understanding, dialogue management and speech synthesis.