TY - CHAP A1 - Atterer, Michaela A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - No Sooner Said Than Done: Testing the Incrementality of Semantic Interpretations of Spontaneous Speech T2 - Proceedings of Interspeech 2009 : 6 - 10 September 2009, Brighton, U.K. N2 - Ideally, a spoken dialogue system should react without much delay to a user’s utterance. Such a system would already select an object, for instance, before the user has finished her utterance about moving this particular object to a particular place. A prerequisite for such a prompt reaction is that semantic representations are built up on the fly and passed on to other modules. Few approaches to incremental semantics construction exist, and, to our knowledge, none of those has been systematically tested on a spontaneous speech corpus. In this paper, we develop measures to test empirically on transcribed spontaneous speech to what extent we can create semantic interpretation on the fly with an incremental semantic chunker that builds a frame semantics. KW - incrementality KW - spoken dialogue systems KW - spontaneous speech KW - evaluation Y1 - 2009 U6 - https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2009-539 SP - 1855 EP - 1858 PB - International Speech Communication Association CY - Brighton, UK ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Buß, Okko A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - Evaluation and Optimisation of Incremental Processors JF - Dialogue & Discourse N2 - Incremental spoken dialogue systems, which process user input as it unfolds, pose additionalengineering challenges compared to more standard non-incremental systems: Their processingcomponents must be able to accept partial, and possibly subsequently revised input, and mustproduce output that is at the same time as accurate as possible and delivered with as little delay aspossible. In this article, we define metrics that measure how well a given processor meets thesechallenges, and we identify types of gold standards for evaluation. We exemplify these metrics inthe evaluation of several incremental processors that we have developed. We also present genericmeans to optimise some of the measures, if certain trade-offs are accepted. We believe that thiswork will help enable principled comparison of components for incremental dialogue systems andportability of results. KW - evaluation KW - incrementality, KW - spoken dialogue systems KW - incremental processing KW - timing Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5087/dad.2011.106 VL - 2 IS - 1 SP - 113 EP - 141 PB - OJS ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - Evaluating Prosodic Processing for Incremental Speech Synthesis T2 - Proceedings of Interspeech 2012 N2 - Incremental speech synthesis (iSS) accepts input and produces output in consecutive chunks that only together result in a full utterance. Systems that use iSS thus have the ability to adapt their utterances while they are ongoing. Having available less than the full utterance to plan the acoustic realisation has downsides, however, as global optimisation is not possible anymore. In this paper we present a strategy for incrementalizing the symbolic pre-processing component of speech synthesis and assess the influence of a reduction in "lookahead", i. e. in knowledge about the rest of the utterance, on prosodic quality. We found that high quality incremental output can be achieved even with a lookahead of slightly less than one phrase, allowing for timely system reaction. KW - speech synthesis KW - spoken dialogue systems KW - incrementality KW - prosody Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2012-152 SP - 438 EP - 441 PB - International Speech Communication Association ER -