Management and Evaluation of Interactive Dialog in the Air Travel Domain

This paper presents the Unisys Spoken Language System, as applied to the Air Travel Planning (ATIS) domain. This domain provides a rich source of inter active dialog, and has been chosen as a common application task for the development and evaluation of spoken language understanding systerns. The Un...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Norton, Lewis M, Dahl, Deborah A, McKay, Donald P, Hirschman, Lynette, Linebareger, Marcia C, Magerman, David, Ball, Catherine N
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
ACCESS
AIRPORTS
DATA BASES
INTERACTIONS
INTERFACES
LANGUAGE
Linguistics
MANAGEMENT
NATURAL LANGUAGE
PLANNING
SPEECH
SUPERVISORS
TEST AND EVALUATION
TRAVEL
WORDS(LANGUAGE)
Online Access:Request full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper presents the Unisys Spoken Language System, as applied to the Air Travel Planning (ATIS) domain. This domain provides a rich source of inter active dialog, and has been chosen as a common application task for the development and evaluation of spoken language understanding systerns. The Unisys approach to developing a spoken language system combines SUMMIT (the MIT speech recognition system [6]), PUNDIT (the Unisys language understanding system [3]) and an Ingres database of air travel information for eleven cities and nine airports (the ATIS database). Access to the database is mediated via a general knowledge- base/database interface (the Intelligent Database Server [4]). To date, we have concentrated on the language understanding and database interface components. A Dialog Manager integrates the overall user-system interaction. The Dialog Manager accepts user requests in the form of strings of words and calls PUNDIT to interpret the input; it then calls the database indirectly, via the IDS database interface. An important function of the Dialog Manager is to maintain a record of the discourse context, so that the system can successfully process connected dialog. We first describe our architecture in more detail, then give a short discussion of dialog management, a topic we feel will be crucial to successful systems interacting with users via natural language. We conclude with the presentation and analysis of results from the ATIS common evaluation task and from data gathered at Unisys using our system. Sponsored in part by DARPA.