Abstract
vAssist (Voice Controlled Assistive Care and Communication Services for the Home) is a European project for which several research institutes and companies have been working on the development of adapted spoken interfaces to support home care and communication services. This paper describes the spoken dialog system that has been built. Its natural language understanding module includes a novel reference resolver and it introduces a new hierarchical paradigm to model dialog tasks. The user-centered approach applied to the whole development process led to the setup of several experiment sessions with real users. Multilingual experiments carried out in Austria, France and Spain are described along with their analyses and results in terms of both system performance and user experience. An additional experimental comparison of the RavenClaw and Disco-LFF dialog managers built into the vAssist spoken dialog system highlighted similar performance and user acceptance.
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Acknowledgements
The presented research is conducted as part of the vAssist project (AAL-2010-3-106), which is partially funded by the European Ambient Assisted Living Joint Programme and the National Funding Agencies from Austria, France and Italy. It has also been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science under grant TIN2014-54288-C4-4-R and by the Basque Government under grant IT685-13.
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Olaso, J.M. et al. (2017). A Multi-lingual Evaluation of the vAssist Spoken Dialog System. Comparing Disco and RavenClaw. In: Jokinen, K., Wilcock, G. (eds) Dialogues with Social Robots. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 427. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2585-3_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2585-3_17
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