One of my colleague made a presentation at Human-Agent-Interaction symposium in Tokyo yesterday.
The assumption is that the human-like spoken dialogs are highly effective. Our proposal is to use the reinforcement-learning for acquiring the strategy how to respond quickly to overlapped utterances, interruptions, or gestures during spoken dialogs between human and machine. Although the research is still in early stage, we hope something like mind-reading will be possible, in other words, the users of spoken dialog systems do not need to say from the beginning to the end. Continue reading “Voice interface and effectiveness”
I am developing a service called orpheus_tw.
Japanese songs composed by the automatic composition system “Orpheus” (a research project at the University of Tokyo) can be shared with the followers of a Twitter account @orpheus_tw.
This service was built with Ruby and Rails, and hosted by Heroku. Additional “delayed job” option is also used.
Masayuki Nakazawa, Takuya Nishimoto, Shigeki Sagayama:
Title: Behavior Generation for Spoken Dialogue Agent by Dynamical Model
Abstract: For the spoken dialog systems with the anthropomorphic agents, it is important to give the natural impressions and the real presence to human. For this purpose, the head and gaze controls of the agent which are consistent with the spoken dialogs are expected to be effective. Our approach is based on the following hypotheses: 1) An agent performs the dialog concurrently with the intentional controls of the head and gaze to retrieve the information and to give signals. 2) The movement of the head and eyeballs is based on mathematical models. To achieve these purpose, we have adopt the mathematical model for movements of the agent.
There are several merits to formulate by the mathematical model, a) the parameters can reflect the subjectivity which can generate various movement from this model, b) the movements of the agents can reflect the personality, c) the continuous movements of the agent can be controlled by the mathematics. In this paper, we propose a mathematics model by the second order system and perform comparison with the linear model and show the superiority.
Di Lu, Masayuki Nakazawa, Takuya Nishimoto, Shigeki Sagayama:
Title: Barge-in Control with Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Multi-modal Spoken Dialogue Agent Abstract: To make the dialogue between the agent and the user smoother, we propose a multi-modal user simulator that could be widely used in real-time agent control for multi-modal dialog agent with reinforcement learning. We also implemented the prototype system that utilized the result of reinforcement learning.
I am working on my presentation at WIT/SP meeting as follows.
Title: The comparison between the deletion-based methods and the mixing-based methods for safe speech CAPTCHA systems
Authors: Takuya NISHIMOTO, Hitomi MATSUMURA and Takayuki WATANABE
Abstract: Speech-based CAPTCHA systems, which distinguish between software agents and human beings, are especially important for persons with visual disability. The popular approach is based on mixing-based methods, which use the mixed sounds of target speech and noises. We have proposed a deletion-based method which uses the phonemic restoration effects. Our approach can control the difficulty of tasks simply by the masking ratio. Our design principle of CAPTCHA insists that such tasks should be chosen so that the larger difference in performance between the machines and human beings can be provided. In this paper, we give some hypotheses on the differences between the deletion-based method and the mixing-based methods. We also show a plan of experiments which compare the automatic speech recognition performance, speech intelligibility, and mental workload of these two approaches.
Please notice that current version is for Japanese conversations. I would like to discuss the plans for internationalization of this tools. The English documents are not fully checked. Please give me the comments and suggestions at galatea-i18n mailing list, which is hosted at sourceforge.jp.
P.S. Galatea Toolkit Video Demos are now available at YouTube.
Multimodal interactive systems are expected to be used widely. To realize life-like agents or humanoid robots, flexible architecture for integrating software modules is necessary. Many frameworks are proposed.
Joseph Polifroni, Stephanie Seneff. 2000. Galaxy-II as an Architecture for Spoken Dialogue Evaluation. Proceedings of Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pp.42-50.
Yosuke Matsusaka, Kentaro Oku, Tetsunori Kobayashi. 2003. Design and Implementation of Data Sharing Architecture for Multi-Functional Robot Development. Trans. of IEICE, Vol.J86-D1, No.5, pp.318-329 (in Japanese).
Radio is familiar and important media, especially for elderly people and persons with visually impaired. The community-broadcasting offices are also increasing, because they are useful at the time of disaster.
To make the regional information programs, however, take the time and effort of news-gathering.
From this viewpoint, we developed a system “O’ra-be” for broadcasting voice messages posted by telephone, which is useful for small radio broadcasting offices.
The development of O’ra-be was initially supported by Mitou Software Development Program of IPA (Information-technology Promotion Agency), Japan in 2005.
In the IPAX 2009 conference, held in Tokyo on May 27-28, 2009, the first public demonstration of O’ra-be system is going to performed.
Our project did not perform patent query in Japan, and the right was abandoned. The source code and public application server is going to prepared for open use (please see my page on github later).
The system development is anticipated to make more progress through work to introduce Ruby on Rails into implementation part of database and Web application. Moreover, we will appeal for participation in development by shifting to open-source project.
With economic conditions of these days, that “down-sizing” of broadcast advances in every scene is expected as well as individual and small broadcasting station.
Personal computer and the Internet realized the world that anyone can enjoy computer environment of superior quality in low cost. In the same way, it is expected that a broadcast support system will be the important infrastructure in the society and life.
O’ra-be is specialized in user interface for contribution file editing in live broadcasting, and it is extendable to handle video sources. On the basis of the spread of podcasts or video sharing sites in these days, cooperation with existing services can enter visual field in the future.
I tried to use Java Media Components from Java to play MP3 files and at last I succeeded.
The environment is Windows XP, and JavaFX SDK 1.1 is installed at c:\Program Files\JavaFX\javafx-sdk.
I can agree to the claim that functions of JavaFX are important, but script language is unnecessary. However, the following writing style is redundant. I want to use this technique to reuse resources which I implemented in Java in the past. Continue reading “Using JMC from Java”
Objectives
Many of tools for the visually impaired to use a PC and the Web are commercial software at present. The following problems occur due to this.
The financial problem.
It is difficult to follow flexibly and rapidly for a change of needs and the OS environment of the user.
The needs cannot be shared among Web developers and persons with visual disability. The tool with speech is useful to verify Web accessibility. However, a lot of Web developers do not use it because such a software is charged.
In late years, NVDA, an open-source screen reader for Windows, attracts attention.
(continue from previous post)
I have implemented a simple template engine for Java before experiencing Ruby on Rails, and have used template engines for PHP and Perl. However, the installation may be troublesome, and it was dissatisfaction to have to use engine-dependent description languages.
Ruby has a template engine called ERB by default. We can use Ruby language itself in ERB. The function of ERB is easily available from our own Ruby script. I have a good feeling about these things.
A VoiceXML browser and an HTML browser are not completely equivalent positioning. In addition, further consideration is necessary when you put modalities together. How should we make up in which hierarchy? We want to make proposals for it, on the basis of experience of implementations.
