RI: SMALL: LexE: Using Two-part Lexical Entrainment for More Efficient and Reliable Spoken Dialogue Systems

当人类彼此交谈并希望对话顺利进行时，他们会相互适应。美国人说话的方式，使用相同的词汇，语法结构和表达。为了从根本上改善口语对话系统的表现，LexE正在使用微妙的技术来模拟这种适应，这被称为词汇夹带。LexE正在让用户适应他们的语音系统，以及获得系统？S语音以适应用户所说的内容。为了做到这一点，LexE研究人与人之间的对话，以找到对话参与者经常使用的单词和结构（启动词）。然后，口语对话系统在输出中使用这些素数。该系统还检测用户用来指代物体的表达，并在其合成语音中使用这些表达。两个真实用户的口语对话系统被用作LexE的测试平台。第一个是阿勒格尼县港务局的公交信息系统；第二个是匹兹堡311非紧急服务中心通过使这些公开可用的口语对话系统更容易使用，LexE使它们（以及其他口语对话系统）更容易为我们的大部分人口所接受，其中许多人，例如老年人，通过电话获得很多信息。在这个项目中开发的技术也为非母语人士的教育和语言治疗提供了见解，在这些领域，辅导系统可以模仿人类隐式纠正对话者所说错误的方式。

When humans speak to each other and want the dialogue to go well, they adapt to each other?s manner of speaking, using the same words, grammatical constructions and expressions. In order to make fundamental improvements in the performance of spoken dialogue systems, LexE is using subtle techniques to model this adaptation, which is called lexical entrainment. LexE is getting users to adapt their speech to the system, as well as getting the system?s speech to adapt to what the user says. To do this, LexE studies human-human dialogues to find the words and constructions (the ?primes?) that are often adopted by dialogue participants. The spoken dialogue system then uses these primes in its output. The system also detects the expressions that its user employs to refer to objects uses them in its synthetic speech. Two real-user spoken dialogue systems are being used as test platforms for LexE. The first is a bus information system for the Port Authority of Allegheny County; the second is the City of Pittsburgh 311 non-emergency service. By making these publicly-available spoken dialogue systems easier to use, LexE makes them (and other spoken dialogue systems) more accessible to a large part of our population, many of whom, the elderly, for example, get much of their information over the telephone. The techniques developed in this project also provide insights for the education of non-native speakers and for speech therapy, where tutoring systems can imitate the way humans implicitly correct errors in what their interlocutors say.