10,284 research outputs found

    A Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations

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    Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases. Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type, such as movies or restaurants, but are still somewhat awkward to use. Our solution is to take advantage of the complementary strengths of personalized recommendation systems and dialogue systems, creating personalized aides. We present a system -- the Adaptive Place Advisor -- that treats item selection as an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item attributes and the user responding. Individual, long-term user preferences are unobtrusively obtained in the course of normal recommendation dialogues and used to direct future conversations with the same user. We present a novel user model that influences both item search and the questions asked during a conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in significantly reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory item, as compared to a control group of users interacting with a non-adaptive version of the system

    Dialogue based interfaces for universal access.

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    Conversation provides an excellent means of communication for almost all people. Consequently, a conversational interface is an excellent mechanism for allowing people to interact with systems. Conversational systems are an active research area, but a wide range of systems can be developed with current technology. More sophisticated interfaces can take considerable effort, but simple interfaces can be developed quite rapidly. This paper gives an introduction to the current state of the art of conversational systems and interfaces. It describes a methodology for developing conversational interfaces and gives an example of an interface for a state benefits web site. The paper discusses how this interface could improve access for a wide range of people, and how further development of this interface would allow a larger range of people to use the system and give them more functionality

    Towards Best Practice Standards for Enhanced Knowledge Discovery Systems

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    Assessing enhanced knowledge discovery systems (eKDSs) constitutes an intricate issue that is understood merely to a certain extent by now. Based upon an analysis of why it is difficult to formally evaluate eKDSs, it is argued for a change of perspective: eKDSs should be understood as intelligent tools for qualitative analysis that support, rather than substitute, the user in the exploration of the data; a qualitative gap will be identified as the main reason why the evaluation of enhanced knowledge discovery systems is difficult. In order to deal with this problem, the construction of a best practice model for eKDSs is advocated. Based on a brief recapitulation of similar work on spoken language dialogue systems, first steps towards achieving this goal are performed, and directions of future research are outlined

    Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies

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    Speech media, that is, digital audio and video containing spoken content, has blossomed in recent years. Large collections are accruing on the Internet as well as in private and enterprise settings. This growth has motivated extensive research on techniques and technologies that facilitate reliable indexing and retrieval. Spoken content retrieval (SCR) requires the combination of audio and speech processing technologies with methods from information retrieval (IR). SCR research initially investigated planned speech structured in document-like units, but has subsequently shifted focus to more informal spoken content produced spontaneously, outside of the studio and in conversational settings. This survey provides an overview of the field of SCR encompassing component technologies, the relationship of SCR to text IR and automatic speech recognition and user interaction issues. It is aimed at researchers with backgrounds in speech technology or IR who are seeking deeper insight on how these fields are integrated to support research and development, thus addressing the core challenges of SCR

    Vocal Access to a Newspaper Archive: Design Issues and Preliminary Investigation

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    This paper presents the design and the current prototype implementation of an interactive vocal Information Retrieval system that can be used to access articles of a large newspaper archive using a telephone. The results of preliminary investigation into the feasibility of such a system are also presented

    A system design for human factors studies of speech-enabled Web browsing

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    This paper describes the design of a system which will subsequently be used as the basis of a range of empirical studies aimed at discovering how best to harness speech recognition capabilities in multimodal multimedia computing. Initial work focuses on speech-enabled browsing of the World Wide Web, which was never designed for such use. System design is complete, and is being evaluated via usability testing
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