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. This book 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. It 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 technology. It will also prove to be a valuable resource to system developers working in these areas.