This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th IEEE Tutorial and Research Workshop on Perception and Interactive Technologies for Speech-Based Systems, PIT 2008, held in Kloster Irsee, Germany, in June 2008. The 37 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited keynote lecture were carefully selected from numerous submissions for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on multimodal and spoken dialogue systems, classification of dialogue acts and sound, recognition of eye gaze, head poses, mimics and speech as well as combinations of modalities, vocal emotion recognition, human-like and social dialogue systems, and evaluation methods for multimodal dialogue systems.

The main topic of this volume is natural multimodal interaction. The book is unique in that it brings together a great many contributions regarding aspects of natural and multimodal interaction written by many of the important actors in the field. Topics addressed include talking heads, conversational agents, tutoring systems, multimodal communication, machine learning, architectures for multimodal dialogue systems, systems evaluation, and data annotation.

This book presents the outcomes of the 9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems (IWSDS), “Towards creating more human-like conversational agent technologies”. It compiles and provides a synopsis of current global research to push forward the state of the art in dialogue technologies, including advances in the context of the classical problems of language understanding, dialogue management and language generation, as well as cognitive topics related to the human nature of conversational phenomena, such as humor, empathy and social context understanding and awareness.

Dialogue systems are a very appealing technology with an extraordinary future. Spoken, Multilingual and Multimodal Dialogues Systems: Development and Assessment addresses the great demand for information about the development of advanced dialogue systems combining speech with other modalities under a multilingual framework. It aims to give a systematic overview of dialogue systems and recent advances in the practical application of spoken dialogue systems. Spoken Dialogue Systems are computer-based systems developed to provide information and carry out simple tasks using speech as the interaction mode. Examples include travel information and reservation, weather forecast information, directory information and product order. Multimodal Dialogue Systems aim to overcome the limitations of spoken dialogue systems which use speech as the only communication means, while Multilingual Systems allow interaction with users that speak different languages. Presents a clear snapshot of the structure of a standard dialogue system, by addressing its key components in the context of multilingual and multimodal interaction and the assessment of spoken, multilingual and multimodal systems In addition to the fundamentals of the technologies employed, the development and evaluation of these systems are described Highlights recent advances in the practical application of spoken dialogue systems This comprehensive overview is a must for graduate students and academics in the fields of speech recognition, speech synthesis, speech processing, language, and human–computer interaction technolgy. It will also prove to be a valuable resource to system developers working in these areas.

Most dialogues are multimodal. When people talk, they use not only their voices, but also facial expressions and other gestures, and perhaps even touch. When computers communicate with people, they use pictures and perhaps sounds, together with textual language, and when people communicate with computers, they are likely to use mouse gestures almost as much as words. How are such multimodal dialogues constructed? This is the main question addressed in this selection of papers of the second Venaco Workshop, sponsored by the NATO Research Study Group RSG-10 on Automatic Speech Processing, and by the European Speech Communication Association (ESCA).

This book describes an extension of the user behaviour simulation (UBS) of an existing tool for automatic usability evaluation (AUE). This extension is based upon a user study with a smart home system. It uses technical-sociological methods for the execution of the study and the analysis of the collected data. A comparison of the resulting UBS with former UBSs, as well as the empirical data, shows that the new simulation approach outperforms the former simulation. The improvement affects the prediction of dialogue metrics that are related to dialogue efficiency and dialogue effectiveness. Furthermore, the book describes a parameter-based data model, as well as a related framework. Both are used to uniformly describe multimodal human-computer interactions and to provide such descriptions for usability evaluations. Finally, the book proposes a new two-stage method for the evaluation of UBSs. The method is based on the computation of a distance measures between two dialogue corpora and the pair-wise comparison of distances among several dialogue corpora.