A dynamic vocabulary spoken dialogue interface

Abstract

Mixed-initiative spoken dialogue systems today generally allow users to query with a fixed vocabulary and grammar that is determined prior to run-time. This paper presents a spoken dialogue interface enhanced with a dynamic vocabulary capability. One or more word classes can be made dynamic in the speech recognizer and natural language (NL) grammar so that a context-specific vocabulary subset can be incorporated on-the-fly as the context of the dialogue changes, at each dialogue turn. Described is a restaurant information domain which continually updates the restaurant name class, given the dialogue context. We examine progress made to the speech recognizer, natural language parser and dialogue manager in order to support the dynamic vocabulary capability, and present preliminary experimental results conducted from simulated dialogues.