TY - CHAP A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Buß, Okko A1 - Atterer, Michaela A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - Evaluating the Potential Utility of ASR N-Best Lists for Incremental Spoken Dialogue Systems T2 - Proceedings of Interspeech 2009 : speech and intelligence ; 6 - 10 September, 2009, Brighton, UK N2 - The potential of using ASR n-best lists for dialogue systems has often been recognised (if less often realised): it is often the case that even when the top-ranked hypothesis is erroneous, a bet- ter one can be found at a lower rank. In this paper, we describe metrics for evaluating whether the same potential carries over to incremental dialogue systems, where ASR output is consumed and reacted upon while speech is still ongoing. We show that even small N can provide an advantage for semantic process- ing, at a cost of a computational overhead. KW - dialogue systems KW - speech recognition KW - naturallanguage understanding KW - incrementality Y1 - 2009 U6 - https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2009-318 SP - 1031 EP - 1034 PB - ISCA CY - Brighton, UK ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Buß, Okko A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - InproTK in Action: Open-Source Software for Building German-Speaking Incremental Spoken Dialogue Systems T2 - Electronic speech signal processing 2010 : proceedings of the 21st conference, Berlin, 8 - 10 September 2010 N2 - We present INPROTK, a toolkit for building incremental spoken dia-logue systems. Incremental spoken dialogue systems (systems that may react whilethe user’s utterance is ongoing) are a fairly recent research topic and allow for ex-citing new features. Even though toolkits exist that help in building conventionaldialogue systems, INPROTK offers both a tested architecture for building incre-mental SDSs as well as many of the building blocks necessary when building suchsystems. With INPROTK a researcher can avoid many of the technical difficulties,which hopefully further fosters research in this area. Y1 - 2010 UR - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233540470_InproTK_in_Action_Open-Source_Software_for_Building_German-Speaking_Incremental_Spoken_Dialogue_Systems SP - 204 EP - 211 PB - TUDpress CY - Berlin, Germany 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 - Peldszus, Andreas A1 - Buß, Okko A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - Joint Satisfaction of Syntactic and Pragmatic Constraints Improves Incremental Spoken Language Understanding T2 - EACL 2012 Joint Workshop of LINGVIS & UNCLH, Visualization of Linguistic Patterns and Uncovering Language History from Multilingual Resources, Proceedings of the Workshop, April 23 - 24 2012, Avignon France N2 - We present a model of semantic processing of spoken language that (a) is robust against ill-formed input, such as can be expected from automatic speech recognisers, (b) respects both syntactic and pragmatic constraints in the computation of most likely interpretations, (c) uses a principled, expressive semantic representation formalism (RMRS) with a well-defined model theory, and (d) works continuously (producing meaning representations on a word-by-word basis, rather than only for full utterances) and incrementally (computing only the additional contribution by the new word, rather than re-computing for the whole utterance-so-far). We show that the joint satisfaction of syntactic and pragmatic constraints improves the performance of the NLU component (around 10 % absolute, over a syntax-only baseline). Y1 - 2012 UR - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233540473_Joint_Satisfaction_of_Syntactic_and_Pragmatic_Constraints_Improves_Incremental_Spoken_Language_Understanding SN - 978-1-937284-19-0 SP - 514 EP - 523 PB - The Association for Computational Linguistics ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Buß, Okko A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - Collaborating on Utterances with a Spoken Dialogue System Using an ISU-based Approach to Incremental Dialogue Management T2 - SIGDIAL 10, Proceedings of the 11th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, Tokyo Japan September 24 - 25, 2010 N2 - When dialogue systems, through theuse of incremental processing, arenot bounded anymore by strict, non-overlapping turn-taking, a whole range ofadditional interactional devices becomesavailable. We explore the use of one suchdevice, trial intonation. We elaborateour approach to dialogue managementin incremental systems, based on theInformation-State-Update approach, anddiscuss an implementation in a micro-domain that lends itself to the use ofimmediate feedback, trial intonations andexpansions. In an overhearer evaluation,the incremental system was judged as sig-nificantly more human-like and reactivethan a non-incremental version. Y1 - 2010 UR - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220794407_Collaborating_on_Utterances_with_a_Spoken_Dialogue_System_Using_an_ISU-based_Approach_to_Incremental_Dialogue_Management SN - 978-1-932432-85-5 PB - Association for Computational Linguistics CY - Tokyo, Japan ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Schlangen, David A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Buschmeier, Hendrik A1 - Buß, Okko A1 - Kopp, Stefan A1 - Skantze, Gabriel A1 - Yaghoubzadeh, Ramin T1 - Middleware for Incremental Processing in Conversational Agents T2 - Proceedings of the 11th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SigDial 2010), September 24 - 25, 2010, Tokyo Japan N2 - We describe work done at three sites on designing conversational agents capable of incremental processing. We focus on the ‘middleware’ layer in these systems, which takes care of passing around and maintaining incremental information between the modules of such agents. All implementations are based on the abstract model of incremental dialogue processing proposed by Schlangen and Skantze (2009), and the paper shows what different instantiations of the model can look like given specific requirements and application areas. Y1 - 2010 UR - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47735874_Middleware_for_Incremental_Processing_in_Conversational_Agents SP - 51 EP - 54 PB - Association for Computational Linguistics CY - Tokyo, Japan ER -