Title :
Continuous asr for flexible incremental dialogue
Author :
Breslin, C. ; Gasic, M. ; Henderson, Mike ; Kim, Dongkyu ; Szummer, M. ; Thomson, B. ; Tsiakoulis, Pirros ; Young, Stephanie
Author_Institution :
Eng. Dept., Cambridge Univ., Cambridge, UK
Abstract :
Spoken dialogue systems provide a convenient way for users to interact with a machine using only speech. However, they often rely on a rigid turn taking regime in which a voice activity detection (VAD) module is used to determine when the user is speaking and decide when is an appropriate time for the system to respond. This paper investigates replacing the VAD and discrete utterance recogniser of a conventional turn-taking system with a continuously operating recogniser that is always listening, and using the recogniser 1-best path to guide turn taking. In this way, a flexible framework for incremental dialogue management is possible. Experimental results show that it is possible to remove the VAD component and successfully use the recogniser best path to identify user speech, with more robustness to noise, potentially smaller latency times, and a reduction in overall recognition error rate compared to using the conventional approach.
Keywords :
interactive systems; speech processing; continuous ASR; discrete utterance recogniser; flexible incremental dialogue; operating recogniser; recognition error rate; spoken dialogue systems; voice activity detection; Acoustics; Adaptation models; Data models; Hidden Markov models; Noise measurement; Speech; Speech recognition; ASR; Dialogue system; POMDP; VAD; incremental ASR;
Conference_Titel :
Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2013 IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Vancouver, BC
DOI :
10.1109/ICASSP.2013.6639296