Adaptive interface for spoken dialog

Speech has become increasingly important in human–computer interaction. Spoken dialog interfaces rely on automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis, language understanding, and dialog management. A main issue in dialog systems is that they typically are limited to pre‐programmed vocabularies and sets of sentences. The research reported here focuses on developing an adaptive spoken dialog interface capable of acquiring new linguistic units and their corresponding semantics during the human–computer interaction. The adaptive interface identifies unknown words and phrases in the users utterances and asks the user for the corresponding semantics. The user can provide the meaning or the semantic representation of the new linguistic units through multiple modalities, including speaking, typing, pointing, touching, or showing. The interface then stores the new linguistic units in a semantic grammar and creates new objects defining the corresponding semantic representation. This process takes place during natural interaction between user and computer and, thus, the interface does not have to be rewritten and compiled to incorporate the newly acquired language. Users can personalize the adaptive spoken interface for different domain applications, or according to their personal preferences. [Work supported by NSF.]