SHTQS: A telephone-based Chinese spoken dialogue system

摘要

SHTQS is an intelligent telephone-based spoken dialogue system providing the information about the best route between two sites in Shanghai. Instead of separated parts of speech decoding and language parsing, a close cooperation is carried out in SHTQS by integrating automatic speech recognizer (ASR), language understanding, dialogue management and speech generator. In such a way, the erroneous analysis and uncertainty happening in the preceding stages would be recovered and determined accurately with high-level knowledge. Makeover, instead of shallow word-level analysis or simply keyword or key phrase matching, a deeper analysis is performed in our system by integrating a robust parser and a semantic interpreter. The robust parser is particularly important for spontaneous speech inputs because most of the inquiry sentences/phrases are ill-formed. In addition, in designing a mixed-initiative dialogue system, understanding users' inquiries is essential; however, simply matching keywords and/or key phrases can hardly achieve this. Therefore, a semantic interpreter is incorporated in our system. The performance of SHTQS is also evaluated. The dialogue efficiency is 4.4 sentences per query on an average and the case precision rate of language understanding module is up to 81%. The results are satisfactory.