Semantic Processing of Out-Of-Vocabulary Words in a Spoken Dialogue System

One of the most important causes of failure in spoken dialogue systems is usually neglected: the problem of words that are not covered by the system's vocabulary (out-of-vocabulary or OOV words). In this paper a methodology is described for the detection, classification and processing of OOV words in an automatic train timetable information system. The various extensions that had to be effected on the different modules of the system are reported, resulting in the design of appropriate dialogue strategies, as are encouraging evaluation results on the new versions of the word recogniser and the linguistic processor.Comment: 4 pages, 2 eps figures, requires LaTeX2e, uses eurospeech.sty and epsfi

Mitochondrial physiology

As the knowledge base and importance of mitochondrial physiology to evolution, health and disease expands, the necessity for harmonizing the terminology concerning mitochondrial respiratory states and rates has become increasingly apparent. The chemiosmotic theory establishes the mechanism of energy transformation and coupling in oxidative phosphorylation. The unifying concept of the protonmotive force provides the framework for developing a consistent theoretical foundation of mitochondrial physiology and bioenergetics. We follow the latest SI guidelines and those of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) on terminology in physical chemistry, extended by considerations of open systems and thermodynamics of irreversible processes. The concept-driven constructive terminology incorporates the meaning of each quantity and aligns concepts and symbols with the nomenclature of classical bioenergetics. We endeavour to provide a balanced view of mitochondrial respiratory control and a critical discussion on reporting data of mitochondrial respiration in terms of metabolic flows and fluxes. Uniform standards for evaluation of respiratory states and rates will ultimately contribute to reproducibility between laboratories and thus support the development of data repositories of mitochondrial respiratory function in species, tissues, and cells. Clarity of concept and consistency of nomenclature facilitate effective transdisciplinary communication, education, and ultimately further discovery

Mitochondrial physiology

As the knowledge base and importance of mitochondrial physiology to evolution, health and disease expands, the necessity for harmonizing the terminology concerning mitochondrial respiratory states and rates has become increasingly apparent. The chemiosmotic theory establishes the mechanism of energy transformation and coupling in oxidative phosphorylation. The unifying concept of the protonmotive force provides the framework for developing a consistent theoretical foundation of mitochondrial physiology and bioenergetics. We follow the latest SI guidelines and those of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) on terminology in physical chemistry, extended by considerations of open systems and thermodynamics of irreversible processes. The concept-driven constructive terminology incorporates the meaning of each quantity and aligns concepts and symbols with the nomenclature of classical bioenergetics. We endeavour to provide a balanced view of mitochondrial respiratory control and a critical discussion on reporting data of mitochondrial respiration in terms of metabolic flows and fluxes. Uniform standards for evaluation of respiratory states and rates will ultimately contribute to reproducibility between laboratories and thus support the development of data repositories of mitochondrial respiratory function in species, tissues, and cells. Clarity of concept and consistency of nomenclature facilitate effective transdisciplinary communication, education, and ultimately further discovery

Linguistic Processing for Spoken Dialogue Systems - Experiences made in the SYSLID Project -

In our paper we describe experiences in the field of linguistic processing for spoken dialogue systems we made during the project Syslid 1 . Within Syslid a linguistic component for three different domains was developed. We present a development strategy for the creation of linguistic knowledge bases for different domains as well as preliminary results achieved in following this strategy. 1 Introduction So far, most of the spoken dialogue systems being developed are restricted to one single domain, or at least to very closely related domains. Typical examples are inquiry systems for flight schedules or train connections. Great efforts for example have been made within the DARPA spoken language systems programme, amongst others for the ATIS (Air Travel and Information System) domain [9] and within the EC funded ESPRIT project SUNDIAL [10]. In SUNDIAL spoken dialogue systems for several European languages (English, French, German and Italian) for the domains of train timetable informa..

How Statistics and Prosody can guide a Chunky Parser

Introduction Following the most common architecture of spoken dialog systems as shown in Figure 1, the main task of linguistic processing is to yield a semantic representation of what the user said. utterance User System answer Word recognizer Generator Linguistic processor Database base Knowl. control Dialog Figure 1. Typical dialog system architecture. These semantic representations are interpreted by the dialog module according to the dialog context and the system answer will be generated accordingly. The system utterance depends on whether the system still needs certain information or if all necessary information has been given to accomplish its task. In order to know, when all required information has been provided, the dialog This work was partly funded by the European Community in the framework of the SQEL--Project (Spoken Queries in European Languages), Copernicus Project No. 1634. The responsibility for the contents lies wit