ISCA Archive Interspeech 2007
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2007

Handling speech input in the ritel QA dialogue system

Boris van Schooten, Sophie Rosset, Olivier Galibert, Aurélien Max, Rieks op den Akker, Gabriel Illouz

The Ritel system aims to provide open-domain question answering to casual users by means of a telephone dialogue. This implies some unique challenges, such as very fast overall performance and large-vocabulary speech recognition. Speech QA is an error-prone process, but errors or problems that occur may be resolved with help of user feedback, as part of a natural dialogue. This paper reports on a pilot study conducted with the latest version of Ritel, which includes search term confirmation and improved follow-up question handling, as well as various improvements on the other system components. We collected a small dialogue corpus with the new system, which we use to evaluate and discuss it.