The Limsi Arise System for Train Travel Information

In the context of the LE-3 ARISE project we have been developing a dialog system for vocal access to rail travel information. The system provides schedule information for the main French intercity connections, as well as, simulated fares and reservations, reductions and services. Our goal is to obtain high dialog success rates with a very open dialog structure, where the user is free to ask any question or to provide any information at any point in time. In order to improve performance with such an open dialog strategy, we make use of implicit confirmation using the callers wording (when possible), and change to a more constrained dialog level when the dialog is not going well. In addition to own assessment, the prototype system undergoes periodic user evaluations carried out by the our partners at the French Railways. INTRODUCTION The LE-3 ARISE (Automatic Railway Information Systems for Europe) project aims a developing prototype telephone information services for rail travel infor..

Dialog in the RAILTEL Telephone-Based System

Dialog management is of particular importance in telephone-based services. In this paper we describe our recent activities in dialog management and natural language generation in the LIMSI RAILTEL system for access to rail travel information. The aim of LEMLAP project RAILTEL was to assess the capabilities of spoken language technology for interactive telephone information services. Because all interaction is over the telephone, oral dialog management and response generation are very important aspects of the overall system design and usability. Each dialog is analysed to determine the source of any errors (speech recognition, understanding, information retreival, processing, or dialog management). An analysis is provided for 100 dialogs taken from the RAILTEL field trials with naive subjects accessing timetable information. 1. INTRODUCTION The LE-MLAP project RAILTEL "Railway Telephone Information Service" aimed to evaluate spoken language technology in the context of interactive voi..

The LIMSI ARISE System

The LIMSI ARISE system provides vocal access by telephone to rail travel information for main French intercity connections, including timetables, simulated fares and reservations, reductions and services. Our goal is to obtain high dialog success rates with a very open interaction, where the user is free to ask any question or to provide any information at any point in time. In order to improve performance with such an open dialog strategy, we make use of implicit confirmation using the callers wording (when possible), and change to a more constrained dialog level when the dialog is not going well

Development of Spoken Language Corpora for Travel Information

In this paper we report on our ongoing work in developing spoken language corpora in the context of information access in two travel domain tasks, L'ATIS and MASK. The collection of spoken language corpora remains an important research area and represents a significant portion of work in the development of spoken language systems. The use of additional acoustic and language model training data has been shown to almost systematically improve performance in continuous speech recognition. Similarly, progress in spokenlanguage understanding is closely linked to the availability of spoken language corpora. We record subjects on a regular basis using development versions of the spoken language systems for both tasks, obtaining over 1000 queries/month from 20 subjects. To help assess our progress in system development, each subject since March'95 completes a questionnaire addressing the user-friendliness, reliability, ease-of-use of the MASK data collection system. INTRODUCTION The collecti..

Data Collection for the Kiosk: WOz vs Prototype System

The MASK consortium is developing a prototype multimodal multimedia service kiosk for train travel information and reservation, exploiting state-of-the-art speech technology. In this paper we report on our efforts aimed at evaluating alternative user interface designs and at obtaining acoustic and language modeling data for the spoken languagecomponent of the overall system. Simulation methods with increasing degrees of complexity have been used to test the interface design, and to experiment with alternate operating modes. The majority of the speech data has been collected using successive versions of the spoken language system, whose capabilities are incrementally expanded after analysis of the most frequent problems encountered by users of the preceding version. The different data requirements of user interface design and speech corpus acquisition are discussed in light of the experience of the MASK project. 1. INTRODUCTION The aim of the Multimodal-Multimedia Automated Service Ki..