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This paper surveys research areas relevant to cultural heritage digital libraries. The emerging National Science Digital Library promises to establish the foundation on which those of us beyond the scientific and engineering community will likely build. This paper thus articulates the particular issues that we have encountered in developing cultural heritage collections. We provide a broad overview of audiences, collections, and services.

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Abstract:The goal of our research is to design improved interfaces for medical expert systems. Previously, the use of graphical techniques was explored to improve the acceptance by clinicians of the user interface. Now that devices that accept spoken input are available, we wish to design interfaces that take advantage of this potentially more natural modality for interaction. To understand how clinicians might want to speak to a medical decision-support system, we carried out an experiment that simulated the availability of a spoken interface to the ONCOCIN medical expert system. ONCOCIN provides therapy advice for patients on complex cancer therapy protocols based on a description of the patient’s current medical status and laboratory-test values. In the experiment, we had oncologists present a clinical case while observing the ONCOCIN flowsheet display. A project member listened to the presentation and filled in values for the flowsheet, as well as introducing purposeful misunderstandings of the input. The results suggest that each individual developed a stereotypical grammar for communicating with the program. Our experience with the purposeful miscommunications suggests particular ways to tailor requests for repetition based on the part of the utterance that was not understood.

Abstract:This paper describes three prototypes of computer-based clinical record-keeping tools that use a combination of window-based graphics and continuous speech in their user interfaces. Although many of today’s commercial speech-recognition products achieve high rates of accuracy for large grammars (vocabularies of words or collections of sentences and phrases), they can only “listen for” (and therefore recognize) a limited number of words or phrases at a time. When a speech application requires a grammar whose size exceeds a speech-recognition product’s limits, the application designer must partition the large grammar into several smaller ones and develop control mechanisms that permit users to select the grammar that contains the words or phrases they wish to utter. Furthermore, the user interfaces they design must provide feedback mechanisms that show users the scope of the selected grammars. The three prototypes described were designed to explore the use of window-based graphics as control and feedback mechanisms for continuous-speech recognition in medical applications. Our experiments indicate that window-based graphics can be effectively used to provide control and feedback for certain classes of speech applications, but they suggest that the techniques we describe will not suffice for applications whose grammars are very complex.