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Situated dialog in speech-based human-computer interaction
Rudnicky A., Raux A., Lane I., Misu T., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2016. 225 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319218-33-5)
Date Reviewed: Sep 15 2016

Speech-based applications and systems (spoken dialogue and multimodal systems) are actually being implemented for a broad range of domains and applications such as medical applications, tourist guide systems, and so on [1]. These kinds of systems or applications using speech as the principal mode of interaction will become increasingly prevalent [2].

Valuable research works are clearly presented in this book. These research works make a strong contribution to the understanding of different technological aspects of systems with speech interfaces. Technical backgrounds and conducted experiments are presented that actually share basic technical and functional information with the reader.

The book is well structured and divided into three topical sections, where the sequence of chapters seems to be judiciously chosen in order to take the reader gradually through the book from a less complex system with a simple technical background to a more complex system with a more complex background. Chapter after chapter, a reader without previous knowledge in this research field can quickly consolidate his knowledge so that he can follow the train. Furthermore, the entire book would valuably help researchers working in this field to purposefully figure out the state of the art in implementation of spoken dialogue and multimodal applications and systems with speech-based interfaces.

The first section of the book is titled “Dialogue Management and Spoken Language.” This part consists of seven chapters, which mainly handle spoken dialogue processing. The section starts with contributions that clearly state what spoken dialogue is, and then presents the architecture of dialogue systems and some samples as well as a system evaluation. The first chapter is to be considered as the introduction for the entire section. The following chapters address syntactic filtering, context-based retrieval of sentences, task-oriented dialogue, human-computer trust maintenance, user-centered adaptive dialogue, conversational systems, and speech recognition error. Most of the chapters in this section present the background and conducted experiments, whose results are succinctly discussed by the authors.

I personally like the first four chapters in this section, particularly the chapter titled “Knowledge-Guided Interpretation and Generation of Task-Oriented Dialogue.” This work has great potential to help, particularly in implementing remote medical diagnosis applications. Less experienced healthcare professionals can use such a system to determine a diagnosis following the instructions provided by the computer and also interact with the system. A combination of this chapter and the one dealing with “User-Centered Adaptive Dialogue” could contribute to implementing a great remote diagnosis system, which can increase user satisfaction. I would recommend this section to readers (experienced or not) who are interested in understanding the basics of spoken dialogue as well as those interested in implementing a speech-based interface.

The second section, as titled, covers “Human Interaction with Dialogue Systems.” This section contains eight contributions. The section covers, like the previous section, diverse experiments. Systems with speech-based interfaces are investigated. Well-defined experiment plans are methodically set, experiments are conducted and evaluated, and the results are clearly discussed. While the first section focuses more on dialogue management and processing, the second section handles the human interaction with dialogue systems.

The third and last section presents “Speech Recognition and Core Technologies.” All four chapters deal with automatic speech recognition (ASR) and error detection as well as error correction algorithms. This part of the book shows how recognition robustness can be improved using further modalities. Further ASR engine independent error correction is clearly described in this section. This description leads readers through diverse technical backgrounds such as the overall architecture of ASR error detection and correction algorithms.

The book is easy to follow, with a good writing style. It provides exhaustive and comprehensive insight into spoken dialogue systems and speech-based human-computer interaction as well as dialogue in applications with speech interfaces for human interaction with computers and/or machines. The three sections of the book are well elaborated, and the conducted experiments highlight appropriate and existing systems already in use. Furthermore, this book points out the state of the art in implementation of spoken dialogue in applications with speech-based interfaces such as restaurant information systems.

I read this book twice in order to find any overall weakness. There are, however, no missing topics in this book. I can recommend it because it provides valuable basic background and detailed discussion of experiments.

Reviewer:  Thierry Edoh Review #: CR144771 (1612-0875)
1) Bell, L. Linguistic adaptations in spoken human–computer dialogues: empirical studies of user behavior. Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, 2003.
2) Fitzgerald, W.; College, K.; Net, I.; Firby, R. J. Dialogue-based human-computer interfaces and active language understanding. International Journal of Cognition and Technology 1, 2(2002), 275–286.
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