Spoken Dialog System for Database Access on Internet

Abstract In current spoken dialog systems, the design of user interfaces strongly depends on tasks and domains. We intend to develop a general purpose spoken dialog system. It extends existing Graphical User Interface (GUI) design used on-line database services on the World Wide Web (WWW), so that the design of user interface does not require special knowledge about spoken dialogs. Web documents are written in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and Common Gateway Interface (CGI), which naturally guide some dialog interactions as intended by the authors and by the browsers. In other words, each document has its own dialog control strategy in itself. Making use of such strategies enables task-oriented spoken dialogs, provided a single set of task-independent client modules. The dialog management information is extracted from mark-up tags, accordingly free from natural languages of text. Therefore, one could even provide a cross-language feature to the system by combining machine translation systems

Spoken Dialog System for Database Access on Internet

In current spoken dialog systems, the design of user interfaces strongly depends on tasks and domains. We intend to develop a general purpose spoken dialog system. It extends existing Graphical User Interface (GUI) design used in on-line database services on the World Wide Web (WWW), so that the design of user interface does not require special knowledge about spoken dialogs. Web documents are written in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and Common Gateway Interface (CGI), which naturally guide some dialog interactions as intended by the authors and by the browsers. In other words, each document has its own dialog control strategy in itself. Making use of such strategies enables task-oriented spoken dialogs, provided a single set of task-independent client modules. The dialog management information is extracted from mark-up tags, accordingly free from natural languages of text. Therefore, one could even provide a cross-language feature to the system by combining machine translation sys..

Development of a machine learnable discourse tagging tool

We have developed a discourse level tagging tool for spoken dialogue corpus using machine learning methods. As discourse level information, we focused on dialogue act, relevance and discourse segment. In dialogue act tagging, we have implemented a transformation-based learning procedure and resulted in 70 % accuracy in open test. In relevance and discourse segment tagging, we have implemented a decision-tree based learning procedure and resulted in about 75 % and 72 % accuracy respectively.

-1- Design and Evaluation of the Asynchronous Voice Meeting System AVM

A voice communication system for asynchronous meetings held in non-real time will attract a broad range of users because it is convenient and easy to use with mobile devices. To realize such a system, however, it will be necessary to make possible the natural input of the progressive process of speech at the same time as facilitating the quotation of audio information and outlining of others’ references. This study reports the design and evaluation of a new interface for effective asynchronous voice meetings, the AVM (Asynchronous Voice Meeting System), a client-server type meeting system that uses overlapping speech. Speeches were, in particular, displayed as text information on the client side for the effective visualization of comments made during these voice meetings. The proposed system AVM was compared with an electronic bulletin board system by discussing the same topic. Using the AVM, the total number of speech utterances decreased, and the total amount of letters went down to 48 % compared to the conventional electronic bulletin board system. Subjective evaluations also rated the AVM highly, indicating the usefulness of the proposed system AVM. Key Words: voice message, asynchronous non-real time media, interactive communication, overlapping

A questionnaire survey of pharmacists regarding the clinical practice guidelines for the appropriate use of granulocyte-colony stimulating factors

Abstract Background Clinical practice guidelines should be user-friendly and confirming their penetration rate and compliance are critical. Methods We conducted a nationwide web-based questionnaire survey among pharmacists regarding the 2013 guidelines for the appropriate use of granulocyte-colony stimulating factors (G-CSFs) (version 2, published by the Japan Society of Clinical Oncology [JSCO]) between August 24 and September 6, 2015. Results A total of 301 pharmacists responded; 96.0% belonged to hospitals and were board-certified pharmacists in oncology pharmacy (n = 133) and palliative pharmacy (n = 78). In addition, 61.5% of respondents (n = 185) worked for designated cancer care hospitals. The observation that 75.7% of respondents knew that the JSCO guidelines are available on the internet indicated that several pharmacists used this guideline. A high degree of usability by pharmacists was also demonstrated, as 98.0% and 51.5% of respondents, respectively, agreed with the statements “it is useful for the work of pharmacists” and “it is referred to in the actual work of pharmacists”. However, more than half of the respondents (58.4%) agreed with the phrase “there are differences from the actual work of pharmacists”. Conclusions Their responses indicated that the respondents used the G-CSF guidelines and viewed them positively; however, the observation that about half of the respondents reported feeling that the guidelines do not match their current practice requires additional follow-up in future studies. The use of these guidelines should be routinely assessed in order to introduce novel cancer chemotherapy regimens and long-acting G-CSF in clinical practice