Improving strength training of the external rotator muscle may help decrease the rates of anterior cruciate ligament injury in female athletes.

SUMMARYA spoken dialogue system for retrieving academic documents was constructed and evaluated. In order to realize speech reply with its prosodic features properly controlled to express dialogue focus, a concept-to-speech conversion scheme was developed where the reply sentence concept was finally converted step-by-step to phone and prosodic symbol strings to be fed to a speech synthesizer, instead of simply using a text-to-speech conversion scheme as done in other conventional spoken dialogue systems. The main research focuses were on the following three points: (1) generating a reply sentence easily understood by users and unambiguous to users by controlling the amount of information included in it: deleting redundant information and adding necessary information; (2) realizing functions necessary for increasing system usability; (3) generating a speech reply with natural-sounding prosody, with the dialogue focuses correctly conveyed. Evaluations of the original system, formerly developed, gave us guidelines to realize points (1) and (2). Based on them, a revised system was constructed and evaluated, showing the validity of its new functions. It was also shown that speech replies with prosodic features representing dialogue focuses could bring about clearer information transmission.

A spoken dialogue system of information retrieval on academic documents has been developed with a special attention to reply speech generation. In order to realize speech reply with its prosodic features properly controlled to express dialogue focuses, a scheme was developed to directly generating speech reply from reply content. When developing the system firstly, a priority was placed on the automatic processing, and prosodic focus was controlled by rather simple rules (original rules). Based on the listening test for the reply speech generated using original rules, new rules were then developed. Through the further listening test, the rules were revised and called the revised rules. The validity of the revised rules was verified through an evaluation experiment. It was also indicated that there existed users' preferences on the intonation of the reply speech.

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