Summaries in the SBU Rate-A-Course Dialog SystemPatricia DingPatricia Ding

Advisor: Amanda StentAdvisor: Amanda Stent

What is a Summary in Spoken Dialog Systems? A brief statement that presents the main

points in a concise form. Gives system users a brief overview.

Why Are Summaries So Important?

Information presentations take up the most time in spoken dialogues with computers (Stent et al. 2002).

Summaries take up less time, so they can improve users’ satisfaction (Walker et al. 2002).

What is the Rate-A-Course System? A survey dialog system that permits college

students to evaluate their courses over the telephone (Stent et al. 2006). Could be used as a replacement for or in addition to

other course evaluation methods. The survey results, which includes comments to

open-ended questions, are available in electronic form. They can be distributed over the web or telephone.

Currently, the system only lets students rate courses, not hear others’ ratings.

My Summaries

Basic Summary Goes through ratings and gives all information about each course rating.

Summary with no and Better syntax of basic summary.

Parallel Summary Makes sure the topics for each course rating are presented in the same

order. Easier for users to remember the ratings.

Average Summary Presents information by topic, rather than by rating.

Shorter summaries = less bored users. (For the future) User-model Summary

Skip topics the user doesn’t care about.

Implementing My Summaries

VoiceXMLLanguage for writing dialog system behaviorsSimilar to HTML

JavascriptLanguage for constructing the information

presentationsSimilar to Java

I learned VoiceXML and Javascript

Does Anybody Want to Try?

My summaries:877 33 VOCALUser ID: 917-8498PIN: 8498

Rate-a-Course system:877 33 VOCALUser ID: 335 2849PIN: 1122

References

A. Stent, M. Walker, S. Whittaker and P. Maloor. User-tailored generation for spoken dialogue: An experiment. In Proceedings of ICSLP 2002, 2002.

A. Stent, S. Stenchikova and M. Marge. Dialog systems for surveys: The Rate-a-Course system. In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACL 2006 Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, 2006.

Demberg, V.M.,Johanna D.”Information Presentation in Spoken Dialogue System: In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics (EACL), Trento, Italy, April 2006.