Abstract. Social Media provide a vast amount of information identifying stories, events, entities that play the crucial role of shaping the community in an everyday heavy user involvement. This work involves the study of social media information in terms of type (multimodal: text, video, sound, picture) and role players (agents, users, opinion leaders) and the potential of designing accessible, usable interfaces that integrate that information. This case examines the design of a user interface that uses an underlying engine for modality components (plain text, sound, image, video) analysis, social media crawling, contextual search fusion and semantic analysis. The interface is the only point of user interaction to the world of knowledge. This work reports on the usability and accessibility methods and concerns for the user requirements phase and the design control and testing. The findings of the pilot user testing and evaluation provide indications on how the semantic analysis of the social media information can be integrated to the design methodologies for user interfaces resulting in maximization of user experience in terms of social information involvement.

Abstract. Usability is a fundamental requirement for natural language interfaces. Usability evaluation reflects the impact of the interface and the acceptance from the users. This work examines the potential of usability evaluation in terms of issues and methodologies for spoken dialogue interfaces along with the appropriate designer-needs analysis. It unfolds the perspective to the usability integration in the spoken language interface design lifecycle and provides a framework description for creating and testing usable content and applications for conversational interfaces. Main concerns include the problem identification of design issues for usability design and evaluation, the use of customer experience for the design of voice interfaces and dialogue, and the problems that arise from real-life deployment. Moreover it presents a real-life paradigm of a hands-on approach for applying usability methodologies in a spoken dialogue application environment to compare against a DTMF approach. Finally, the scope and interpretation of results from both the designer and the user standpoint of usability evaluation are discussed.

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This chapter presents the state-of-the-art in usability issues and methodologies for VoiceWeb interfaces. It undertakes a theoretical perspective to the usability methodology and provides a framework description for creating and testing usable content and applications for conversational interfaces. The methodologies and their uses are discussed as well as certain technical issues that are of specific importance for each type of system. Moreover, it discusses the hands-on approaches for applying usability methodologies in a spoken dialogue web application environment, including methodological and design issues, resource management, implementation using existing technologies for usability evaluation in several stages of the design and deployment. Finally, the challenging usability issues and parameters of the emerging advanced speech-enabled web interfaces are presented.

Abstract. Information Structure (IS) is known to bear a significant effect on Prosody, making the identification of this effect crucial for improving the quality of synthetic speech. Recent theories identify contrast as a central IS element affecting accentuation. This paper presents the results of two experiments aiming to investigate the function of the different levels of contrast within the topic and focus of the utterance, and their effect on the prosody of Greek. Analysis showed that distinguishing between at least two contrast types is important for determining the appropriate accent type, and, therefore, such a distinction should be included in a description of the IS -Prosody interaction. For this description to be useful for practical applications, a framework is required that makes this information accessible to the speech synthesizer. This work reports on such a language-independent framework integration of all identified grammatical and syntactic prerequisites for creating a linguistically enriched input for speech synthesis.