Extending VERA (Conference Information) Design Specification & Schedules Arthur Chan (AC) Rohit Kumar (RK) Lingyun Gao (LG)

Resources We Need Support from Ravenclaw Developers –On how to setup Ravenclaw AC, RK,LG all have a windows XP machine and ready to set up Ravenclaw –Integration with SkypeIn Creation of backend –Interspeech 2005 LG will parse the backend

Specification Based on notion similar to “Where do we go from here? Research and Commercial Spoken Dialog Systems” Roberto Pieraccini and Juan Huerta, Proceedings of 6th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue 2005 –Every sub-dialogue will need Prompt Expected Input (Grammar, LM, w/wo Parser) Condition on how to go to other dialogues

Welcome Prompt Natural Language Prompt: How may I help you? No understanding Sorry. I didn’t get that. Confirmation Menu: What type of Information you want? Date Author and/or Title Area / Topic Time of Day Got Something Papers Sessions Summary Prompt Confirmation Paper Found Area / Topic Title / Keywords Confirmation No Paper Found Lookup Present Results max.3 More Info? Decide if we have enough info. to lookup few definitive records Interspeech06 Information System: Dialog flowchart

Sample Dialog 1 If everything goes smoothly…… System: Welcome to the Interspeech 2006 Conference Information System. How may I help you? User: Can I have the session information for Wednesday? [System successfully parse the two information, session info and date] System: On which time period you want the information? User: From 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. [System successfully narrow down the number of sessions (N).] System: We have identified 3 sessions on Wednesday 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. They are …… is that what you want? [At most 3 to be presented otherwise too much information and should be refined] User: Yes System: Can I help you on other things today? User: No System: Thanks for using the VERA system

Sample Dialog 2 If non-understanding in main-menu System: Welcome to the Interspeech 2006 Conference Information System. How may I help you? User: Can I have the session information for Wednesday? [System doesn’t understand, decide to go into a more restricted system- initiative dialogues] System: What kind of information do you want? You can say “Session Information”, “Keywords” and “Paper Information”. User: “Session Information” [Assuming system does no confirmation, in reality, system confirm when scores are higher than a certain confidence threshold] System: On which date do you want the session information? For example, you can say “July fifteenth” or “Thursday”. User: Thursday. System: On which area are you interested? For example, you can say “Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition” User: from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. [System gives the information as in Dialogue 1]

Schedules Feb 06  Feb 12: Design, Create 1st Specification Feb 13  Feb 19: Get Ravenclaw up and running, try to build sample applications Feb 20  Mar 05: Create sub-dialogues: Info, Area, Time, Date, Title of Papers Mar 06  Mar 19: Create main menu: build LM that could accept natural dialogue Mar 20  Apr 02: Link Sub-dialogue together Apr 03  Apr 17: Evaluation, Fine tuning, Investigate research questions, report I don’t think we have time till May to work on this. We should utilize Spring break Keep time for proper evaluation and preparing report Everything should be over by April 15 (if we keep initial schedules tight, we will work out by the end of semester) It can be done if as above.

Notes Schedules assume 2 hours work per week from each member –Reality will be different and re-scheduling will be done if needed Current specification has gaps which requires actual understanding of the tools, we will fill in at the right time.