Wolfgang Minker

Laila Dybkjær

Holmer Hemsen

In its nine chapters, this book provides an overview of the state-of-the-art and best practice in several sub-fields of evaluation of text and speech systems and components. The evaluation aspects covered include speech and speaker recognition, speech synthesis, animated talking agents, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, and natural language software like machine translation, information retrieval, question answering, spoken dialogue systems, data resources, and annotation schemes. With its broad coverage and original contributions this book is unique in the field of evaluation of speech and language technology. This book is of particular relevance to advanced undergraduate students, PhD students, academic and industrial researchers, and practitioners.

Evaluation of Text and Speech Systems

Dirk Bühler

This book is based on publications from the ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Multi-Modal Dialogue in Mobile Environments held at Kloster Irsee, Germany, in 2002. The workshop covered various aspects of devel- ment and evaluation of spoken multimodal dialogue systems and components with particular emphasis on mobile environments, and discussed the state-- the-art within this area. On the development side the major aspects addressed include speech recognition, dialogue management, multimodal output gene- tion, system architectures, full applications, and user interface issues. On the evaluation side primarily usability evaluation was addressed. A number of high quality papers from the workshop were selected to form the basis of this book. The volume is divided into three major parts which group together the ov- all aspects covered by the workshop. The selected papers have all been - tended, reviewed and improved after the workshop to form the backbone of the book. In addition, we have supplemented each of the three parts by an invited contribution intended to serve as an overview chapter.

Spoken Multimodal Human-Computer Dialogue in Mobile Environments

Niels Ole Bernsen

This preface tells the story of how Multimodal Usability responds to a special challenge. Chapter 1 describes the goals and structure of this book. The idea of describing how to make multimodal computer systems usable arose in the European Network of Excellence SIMILAR – “Taskforce for cre- ing human-machine interfaces SIMILAR to human-human communication”, 2003– 2007, www. similar. cc. SIMILAR brought together people from multimodal signal processing and usability with the aim of creating enabling technologies for new kinds of multimodal systems and demonstrating results in research prototypes. Most of our colleagues in the network were, in fact, busy extracting features and guring out how to demonstrate progress in working interactive systems, while claiming not to have too much of a notion of usability in system development and evaluation. It was proposed that the authors support the usability of the many multimodal pro- types underway by researching and presenting a methodology for building usable multimodal systems. We accepted the challenge, rst and foremost, no doubt, because the formidable team spirit in SIMILAR could make people accept outrageous things. Second, h- ing worked for nearly two decades on making multimodal systems usable, we were curious – curious at the opportunity to try to understand what happens to traditional usability work, that is, work in human–computer interaction centred around tra- tional graphical user interfaces (GUIs), when systems become as multimodal and as advanced in other ways as those we build in research today.

Laila Dybkjær

Books

Your next favorite book is out there