Proposer: Johanna Moore 511336, J.Moore@ed.ac.uk Adrian Williamson (Graham Technology), Adrian.Williamson@gtnet.com
Self-Proposed: No
Subject Areas: Human-Computer Interaction, Natural Language Processing,
Suitable for the following degrees: MSc in Informatics, MSc in Computer Science, MSc in Cognitive Science and Natural Language,
Principal goal of the project: Design and build a simple Voice-XML based dialogue system for conference information for delegates to the Human-Computer Interaction conference (Leeds, September 2004). Users will be able to call services such as booking rooms, viewing agendas, and getting social and travel information. The trial system will be designed to capture a corpus of data from the conference. The project will include a formative evaluation of the system, prior to deployment.
Description of the project:
*Note: this project will be carried out in collaboration with an industrial partner. This will involve payment for time spent in on-site research, and students may be required to agree certain terms and conditions on IP and confidentiality.*
This project is an opportunity to collaborate with Graham Technology. Graham Technology, Scottish Software Company of the Year 2003, produces business process software that is supplied to a range of Blue-chip companies worldwide. Graham Technology's GT-X allows organisations to produce applications that are truly multi-channel, highly scalable and geared exactly to an organisation's needs. VoiceXML is one of the client technologies that enables GT-X processes to communicate with an organisation's customers. VoiceXML is an XML-based markup language for creating voice interfaces. It uses speech recognition and keypad touchtones for input, and pre-recorded audio and speech synthesis for output.
For the conference system, some processes will be designed and then exposed via the VoiceXML connectivity to the GT-X server. Graham Technology's GT-X software has a native VoiceXML interface and has process models for such tasks, and it handles interaction with underlying databases. The services will be run for the conference on Graham Technology's production system at Inchinnan. WAP and web versions of the information may also be available.
This project will explore the use of VoiceXML to build the conference information system, which will be hosted by Graham Technology, for the HCI 2004 conference in Leeds in September. The demo system should allow users to use servcies such as booking rooms, viewing agendas, and getting social and travel information. Once the system is running, it will be used to collect a corpus of data. The final part of the project will be to present a formative evaluation of the quality of speech recognition of the trial system.
Resources Required: Graham Technology's GT-X process modelling system. Voice server, telephony connections.
Degree of Difficulty: moderate
Background Needed: XML, interest in NLP and dialogue systems
References: