Human verbal interaction with complex information sources.

Research in the field of spoken dialogue systems has been performed with the goal of making such systems more robust and easier to use in demanding situations. The term “spoken dialogue systems” signifies unified software systems containing speech-recognition, speech-synthesis, dialogue management, and ancillary components that enable human users to communicate, using natural spoken language or nearly natural prescribed spoken language, with other software systems that provide information and/or services. The research is proceeding on several fronts: recognition of speech signals, syntactic and semantic parsing, language modeling, discourse analysis, and contact modeling.