37,760 research outputs found
Research on Architectures for Integrated Speech/Language Systems in Verbmobil
The German joint research project Verbmobil (VM) aims at the development of a
speech to speech translation system. This paper reports on research done in our
group which belongs to Verbmobil's subproject on system architectures (TP15).
Our specific research areas are the construction of parsers for spontaneous
speech, investigations in the parallelization of parsing and to contribute to
the development of a flexible communication architecture with distributed
control.Comment: 6 pages, 2 Postscript figure
Learning Fault-tolerant Speech Parsing with SCREEN
This paper describes a new approach and a system SCREEN for fault-tolerant
speech parsing. SCREEEN stands for Symbolic Connectionist Robust EnterprisE for
Natural language. Speech parsing describes the syntactic and semantic analysis
of spontaneous spoken language. The general approach is based on incremental
immediate flat analysis, learning of syntactic and semantic speech parsing,
parallel integration of current hypotheses, and the consideration of various
forms of speech related errors. The goal for this approach is to explore the
parallel interactions between various knowledge sources for learning
incremental fault-tolerant speech parsing. This approach is examined in a
system SCREEN using various hybrid connectionist techniques. Hybrid
connectionist techniques are examined because of their promising properties of
inherent fault tolerance, learning, gradedness and parallel constraint
integration. The input for SCREEN is hypotheses about recognized words of a
spoken utterance potentially analyzed by a speech system, the output is
hypotheses about the flat syntactic and semantic analysis of the utterance. In
this paper we focus on the general approach, the overall architecture, and
examples for learning flat syntactic speech parsing. Different from most other
speech language architectures SCREEN emphasizes an interactive rather than an
autonomous position, learning rather than encoding, flat analysis rather than
in-depth analysis, and fault-tolerant processing of phonetic, syntactic and
semantic knowledge.Comment: 6 pages, postscript, compressed, uuencoded to appear in Proceedings
of AAAI 9
Vision systems with the human in the loop
The emerging cognitive vision paradigm deals with vision systems that apply machine learning and automatic reasoning in order to learn from what they perceive. Cognitive vision systems can rate the relevance and consistency of newly acquired knowledge, they can adapt to their environment and thus will exhibit high robustness. This contribution presents vision systems that aim at flexibility and robustness. One is tailored for content-based image retrieval, the others are cognitive vision systems that constitute prototypes of visual active memories which evaluate, gather, and integrate contextual knowledge for visual analysis. All three systems are designed to interact with human users. After we will have discussed adaptive content-based image retrieval and object and action recognition in an office environment, the issue of assessing cognitive systems will be raised. Experiences from psychologically evaluated human-machine interactions will be reported and the promising potential of psychologically-based usability experiments will be stressed
Who am I talking with? A face memory for social robots
In order to provide personalized services and to
develop human-like interaction capabilities robots need to rec-
ognize their human partner. Face recognition has been studied
in the past decade exhaustively in the context of security systems
and with significant progress on huge datasets. However, these
capabilities are not in focus when it comes to social interaction
situations. Humans are able to remember people seen for a
short moment in time and apply this knowledge directly in
their engagement in conversation. In order to equip a robot with
capabilities to recall human interlocutors and to provide user-
aware services, we adopt human-human interaction schemes to
propose a face memory on the basis of active appearance models
integrated with the active memory architecture. This paper
presents the concept of the interactive face memory, the applied
recognition algorithms, and their embedding into the robot’s
system architecture. Performance measures are discussed for
general face databases as well as scenario-specific datasets
Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies
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
COTA: Improving the Speed and Accuracy of Customer Support through Ranking and Deep Networks
For a company looking to provide delightful user experiences, it is of
paramount importance to take care of any customer issues. This paper proposes
COTA, a system to improve speed and reliability of customer support for end
users through automated ticket classification and answers selection for support
representatives. Two machine learning and natural language processing
techniques are demonstrated: one relying on feature engineering (COTA v1) and
the other exploiting raw signals through deep learning architectures (COTA v2).
COTA v1 employs a new approach that converts the multi-classification task into
a ranking problem, demonstrating significantly better performance in the case
of thousands of classes. For COTA v2, we propose an Encoder-Combiner-Decoder, a
novel deep learning architecture that allows for heterogeneous input and output
feature types and injection of prior knowledge through network architecture
choices. This paper compares these models and their variants on the task of
ticket classification and answer selection, showing model COTA v2 outperforms
COTA v1, and analyzes their inner workings and shortcomings. Finally, an A/B
test is conducted in a production setting validating the real-world impact of
COTA in reducing issue resolution time by 10 percent without reducing customer
satisfaction
Research on speech understanding and related areas at SRI
Research capabilities on speech understanding, speech recognition, and voice control are described. Research activities and the activities which involve text input rather than speech are discussed
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