A Spoken Dialog System for Coordinating Information Consumption and Exploration

Fujie, Shinya; Fukuoka, Ishin; Mugita, Asumi; Takatsu, Hirokatsu; Hayashi, Yoshikatsu; Kobayashi, Tetsuo

doi:10.1145/2854946.2854995

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

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“…Thanks to the progress in the speech technologies in recent years, various kinds of spoken dialog systems with a text-tospeech (TTS) function have emerged, such as information navigation systems [1,2] and storytelling systems [3,4]. We have developed a spoken dialog system that delivers news information through synthetic speech [5] (hereinafter, "news-telling system"). The system talks to the users about the news after collecting articles from news websites and converting them from written-style language into utterances in spoken-style language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosody Control of Utterance Sequence for Information Delivering

Fukuoka

Iwata

Kobayashi³

2017

Interspeech 2017

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We propose a conversational speech synthesis system in which the prosodic features of each utterance are controlled throughout the entire input text. We have developed a "news-telling system," which delivered news articles through spoken language. The speech synthesis system for the news-telling should be able to highlight utterances containing noteworthy information in the article with a particular way of speaking so as to impress them on the users. To achieve this, we introduced role and position features of the individual utterances in the article into the control parameters for prosody generation throughout the text. We defined three categories for the role feature: a nucleus (which is assigned to the utterance including the noteworthy information), a front satellite (which precedes the nucleus) and a rear satellite (which follows the nucleus). We investigated how the prosodic features differed depending on the role and position features through an analysis of news-telling speech data uttered by a voice actress. We designed the speech synthesis system on the basis of a deep neural network having the role and position features added to its input layer. Objective and subjective evaluation results showed that introducing those features was effective in the speech synthesis for the information delivering.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosody Control of Utterance Sequence for Information Delivering

Fukuoka

Iwata

Kobayashi³

2017

Interspeech 2017

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A Spoken Dialogue System for Enabling Information Behavior of Various Intention Levels

Takatsu

Fukuoka

Fujie

et al. 2018

Transactions of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligenc

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This paper describes a spoken dialogue system for accommodating a user's information behaviors with various levels of information need. Our system, given a set of same-topic news articles, compiles a utterance plan that consists of a primary plan for delivering main news content, and the associated subsidiary plans for supplementing the main content. A primary plan is generated by applying text summarization and style conversion techniques. The subsidiary plans are compiled by considering potential user/system interactions. To make this mechanism work, we first classified user's possible passive/active behaviors, and then designed the corresponding system actions. We empirically confirmed that our system was able to deliver the news content smoothly while dynamically adapting to the change of user's intention levels. The smoothness of a conversation can be attributed to the pre-compiled utterance plan.

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A Spoken Dialog System for Coordinating Information Consumption and Exploration

Cited by 2 publications

References 6 publications

Prosody Control of Utterance Sequence for Information Delivering

Prosody Control of Utterance Sequence for Information Delivering

A Spoken Dialogue System for Enabling Information Behavior of Various Intention Levels

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