Contents

• Course Description
• Major Topics
• Readings
• Course Mechanics

• Course Materials
  

Course Description

Dialog systems and processes are an increasingly vital area of interest both in research and in practical applications. The purpose of this course is to provide students with the opportunity to implement a complete working state-of-the-art dialogue system and to understand how different components interact to produce a satisfying experiemnce for users.

Systems are implemented as a group project, with individual students contributing according to their interests and the needs of the class. Projects are selected at the start of the semester, when several candidates (suggested by the instructors or proposed by the students) are discussed. The final selection is made with a view to pedagogical benefit, practicality and the potential to engage in original research. In the past the course has built systems from information access to interactive robots. Occasionally, projects lead to publication. 

Syllabus

1. Defining the domain of an application
• Task analysis and domain ontology; target scenarios
  
• Capturing user language and defining a semantic grammar
  
2. Representing and implementing task-based dialogue.
• Task-based dialog representations
  
3. Implementing a spoken dialogue application
   
• Recognition: selecting acoustic models, creating lexical models and building language models [Sphinx]
  
• Understanding: defining the language, creating a robust grammar [Phoenix]
  
• Dialogue management: defining the task and corresponding dialog states [RavenClaw]
  
• Language generation: realising system communications as coherent phrases and sentences [Kalliope]
  
• Synthesis: controlling the characteristics of the system's voice [Festival]
  
• Developing a domain reasoning component and integration with a back-end
• (for some projects) Integrating different input and output modalities
  
4. Performing component evaluations to tune system performance at different levels
   
• Recognition, understanding, dialogue, generation, synthesis
5. Performing usability evaluations with humans users
• Designing and carrying out formative evaluations
• Analysing outcomes and using these to improve system performance
  

Readings

From time to time, readings will be assigned on an ad hoc basis to allow students to learn about specific topics in greater depth.
 

Date	Presenter	Topic	Readings

Course Mechanics

This is a laboratory course. The goal is to teach you about the detailed mechanics of building a dialogue system, sufficient so that you are meant to at least feel that you would be able to go off on your own and build a system on your own. Consequently you will be expected to participate in all phases of class activity and (to the extent that your particular preparation allows) actively engage in design, implementation and evaluation work.

In addition to participating in the weekly class meeting (whose purpose is to discuss general topics in dialogue and to address specific design and implementation issues that come up over the course of the semester) you will work with others in the class to bring the project to successful conclusion. Students are expected to be able to self-organize into an effective team. If you have experience in participating in software development teams, this might be a good opportunity to find out if you've really learned those processes.

From time to time we may decide to read technical papers that address a specific issue that the project has thrown into focus. Note that you can use our local proceedings archive to examine the literature on your own (this link is available only from .cmu.edu). More focussed reading lists have been produced in the companion Seminar in Dialogue Processing (11-716) course.