This book provides a detailed overview of Regulus, an open-source toolkit for building and compiling grammars for spoken dialog systems, which has been used for a number of applications including Clarissa, a spoken language system in use on the International Space Station. The focus is on controlled-language user-initiative systems, in which the user drives the dialog, but is required to use constrained language. Such a spoken language interface allows for a constrained range of commands—for example, “open the pod-bay doors”—to be issued in circumstances where, ergonomically, other interface options are infeasible. The emphasis of the approach, given the kind of application that is the focus of the work, is thus less on robustness of speech recognition and more on depth of semantic processing and quality of the dialog management. It is an interesting book, one which succeeds in motivating key problems and presenting general approaches to solving them, with enough in the way of explicit details to allow even a complete novice in spoken language processing to implement simple dialog systems.
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