The International Computer Science Institute is pleased to present the following talk: Spoken Language Understanding strategies developed at the University of Avignon: for a better integration of ASR and SLU processes Presented by Professor Frederick Bechet from the University of Avignon Thursday, April 12, 2007 2:00 p.m. ICSI Conference Room 5A 1947 Center Street, Suite 600 Berkeley, CA Abstract: In commercial applications based on speech recognition, the quality of the human-computer interaction is still far from being effective both from the user and service provider side. To improve the effectiveness and user acceptance of automated dialogue systems it is necessary to advance the state of the art of Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) research along two directions. First, SLU models have to be tightly coupled with the upstream (Automatic Speech Recognition: ASR) and downstream (Dialog Management: DM) processes. Second, SLU models have to be part of an adaptive component whose parameters are updated on-line based on the outcome of dialog strategies, a-priori or a-posteriori knowledge. In the framework of the European project LUNA, this talk presents the SLU strategies developed at the University of Avignon in these two directions. These strategies are evaluated on two kinds of corpora: an "academic" dialog corpus collected through the French evaluation program Technolangue/MEDIA, and a large "realistic" dialog corpus made of system logs of a widely deployed Spoken Dialog System by France-Telecom R&D (France Telecom 3000 Voice Agency service). This talk will discuss the differences between these two kinds of corpora and the new opportunities for academic research offered by these very large dialog corpora obtained through deployed Spoken Dialog Systems. Frederic Bechet obtained his PhD in computer science in 1994 and is a Professor Assistant at the University of Avignon (France) since 1995. He's been an invited professor for one year at AT&T Research Lab in Florham Park, New Jersey, USA, from August 2001 until September 2002, working within the How May I Help You? research project. Frederic Bechet is the author/coauthor of over 40 refereed papers in journals and international conferences. His main research interests are: - Spoken Language Understanding - Language Models - Shallow parsing (Chunking, POS tagging, Named Entity tagging) - Linguistic aspects of Text-to-Speech synthesis For more information about ICSI, see our website: http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/ For directions to ICSI see: http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/about/location.html ------------------------------- Leah Hitchcock ICSI Communications Coordinator 1947 Center Street, Suite 600 Berkeley, CA 94804 ICSI Seminars mailing list http://mailman.ICSI.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/seminars-list