Some background on dialogue management and conversational speech for dialogue systems

摘要

This special issue of the Journal is concerned with speech and language processing issues in the overall environment of end-to-end dialogue systems, and in particular with the sorts of techniques deployed in the COMPANIONS project which most of the contributors to this issue are associated in one way or another. The aim of the COMPANIONS project was to produce multimodal dialogue agent demonstrators within four years, and the papers in this volume that originate in that project are, in effect, two year prototypes, submitted to evaluations but designed principally as platforms (separately or by a new fusion of components) for further research on the deployment of emotion modelling and of machine learning (ML) techniques of a variety of forms. As will be described, there is already some reportable ML activity in these two-year prototypes.