From antoine at cs.cmu.edu Wed Mar 12 22:13:33 2008 From: antoine at cs.cmu.edu (Antoine Raux) Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:13:33 -0400 Subject: [Olympus announcements 1]: ACL 2008 Tutorial: Building Practical Spoken Dialog Systems Message-ID: <47D88DCD.8040002@cs.cmu.edu> Title: Building Practical Spoken Dialog Systems Abstract: This tutorial will give a practical description of the free software Carnegie Mellon Olympus 2 Spoken Dialog Architecture. Building real working dialog systems that are robust enough for the general public to use is difficult. Most frequently, the functionality of the conversations is severely limited - down to simple question-answer pairs. While off-the-shelf toolkits help the development of such simple systems, they do not support more advanced, natural dialogs nor do they offer the transparency and flexibility required by computational linguistic researchers. However, Olympus 2 offers a complete dialog system with automatic speech recognition (Sphinx) and synthesis (SAPI, Festival) and has been used, along with previous versions of Olympus, for teaching and research at Carnegie Mellon and elsewhere for some 5 years. Overall, a dozen dialog systems have been built using various versions of Olympus, handling tasks ranging from providing bus schedule information to guidance through maintenance procedures for complex machinery, to personal calendar management. In addition to simplifying the development of dialog systems, Olympus provides a transparent platform for teaching and conducting research on all aspects of dialog systems, including speech recognition and synthesis, natural language understanding and generation, and dialog and interaction management. The tutorial will give a brief introduction to spoken dialog systems before going into detail about how to create your own dialog system within Olympus 2, using the Let's Go bus information system as an example. Further, we will provide guidelines on how to use an actual deployed spoken dialog system such as Let's Go to validate research results in the real world. As a possible testbed for such research, we will describe Let's Go Lab, which provides access to both the Let's Go system and its genuine user population for research experiments. Attendees will receive a CD with the latest version of the Olympus 2 architecture, along with several tutorials and example systems. Outline: * Introduction * Overview of current spoken dialog system architectures * Description of the Olympus2 dialog architechture * How to build an Olympus2 dialog system (text I/O) -break- * Expanding an Olympus2 system to use speech - a true spoken dialog system * Discussion of installation requirements and practical system-building issues, including: - telephony - system backend - ASR (re)training / (re)tuning - improving synthesis output - dialog strategies & parameters - monitoring / logging * Using Olympus2 for research and applications - Let's Go Lab: a test platform for dialog systems with real users * Final summary Presenter Bios: Antoine Raux Language Technologies Institute Carnegie Mellon University http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~antoine/ email: antoine at cs.cmu.edu Antoine Raux is a PhD student at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He has been conducting research and published more than 15 reviewed papers on several aspects of dialog systems, including speech recognition, speech synthesis, dialog and interaction management, and system building. His teaching experience includes two teaching assistantships in natural language-related graduate courses, as well as the ongoing design of online tutorials for the Olympus architecture. Brian Langner Language Technologies Institute Carnegie Mellon University http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~blangner/ email: blangner at cs.cmu.edu Brian Langner is a PhD student at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He has been conducting research and published more than 12 reviewed papers on speech synthesis, natural language generation, and spoken dialog systems. He has six semesters of experience as a teaching assistant for graduate and undergraduate computing- or natural language- related courses, including some course design, in addition to continuing work for the Olympus architecture tutorials. Dr. Alan W Black Language Technologies Institute Carnegie Mellon University http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/ email: awb at cs.cmu.edu Alan W Black is an Associate Research Professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He previously worked in the University of Edinburgh, and before that at ATR in Japan. He received his PhD in Computational Linguistics from Edinburgh University in 1993. He is one of the principal authors of the Festival Speech Synthesis System. In addition to speech synthesis, he also works on two-way speech-to-speech translation systems and, telephone-based spoken dialog systems. He also has served on the IEEE Speech Technical Committee (2003-2006), is on the editorial board of Speech Communications and is a board member of ISCA. He teaches a number of graduate and undergraduate courses and has taught a number of short term tutorials on speech synthesis, speech technology and on rapid support for new languages. Dr. Maxine Eskenazi Language Technologies Institute Carnegie Mellon University http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~max/ email: max at cs.cmu.edu Maxine Eskenazi is on the faculty of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She has a BA from Carnegie Mellon University in French and Education and a These de Troisieme Cycle from the Universite de Paris 11 in Computer Science. She has extensive publications on the use of automatic speech processing for spoken dialog systems and on the use of language technologies for computer-assisted language learning. She is the Principal Investigator on the NSF Let's Go project. From antoine at cs.cmu.edu Tue Mar 18 13:56:36 2008 From: antoine at cs.cmu.edu (Antoine Raux) Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:56:36 -0400 Subject: [Olympus announcements 2]: New URL for Olympus Wiki Message-ID: <47E00254.5010606@cs.cmu.edu> Hi everyone, Our original Wiki server died last week. The new URL for the Olympus Wiki is: http://wiki.speech.cs.cmu.edu/olympus Sorry for the inconvenience for those who tried to access it last week without success... Antoine