The Future of Advanced Dialogue Applications Simona Gandrabur, - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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The Future of Advanced Dialogue Applications

Simona Gandrabur, Enterprise NLU & Dialogue Team, Montréal

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What is the future niche for speech?

• Beyond directed prompt, single-slot:

– User frustration : inefficiency, lack-of coverage, lack of flexibility – Competition : Smart Phones

• Beyond standard “how may I help you” call-routing:

– NLU limited to classify the entire utterance in a meaning bucket – Fall-back to directed prompt follow-up questions

• The future “niche” for speech/language: complex problem

solving / deep NLU / multi-modality

– What’s my first meeting with Peter next week? – I want to go to Montréal sometime tomorrow afternoon, I`d like to get there before 6pm. – Did that cheque for Bob Smith go through? – I want to go from <X> to <Y>, and stop at a pharmacy on my way.

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What is needed?

• Use-case = Problem solving

– dynamic call-flow – multi-turn decision logic – data-driven optimizations ⇒Not even SCXML is enough

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What is needed?

• Use-case = Deep NLU

– ASR : SRGC grammars insufficient, need generic “language model” (statistical/rule-based/combinations/other?) – NLU :

• Let’s not standardize the underlying NLU mechanisms
• Richer semantic representation, beyond slot-value pairs
• Example : modifiers / quantifiers. Can we find a common

generic representation?

• Example : relations / frames
• Standard ontologies / knowledge-bases

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What is needed?

• Use-case = Multimodality

– Emma : can’t wait for it to be a requirement! – Abstract semantics : independent of modality, work with common concepts and have modality dependent rendering – Abstract functionality : independent of modality : can we define a limited common I/O modality independent set of functionalities and let the rendering be modality specific – Multi-source input :

• Speech / text / touch / history (conversation, application, user

profile / data) – Multi-source confidence

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What is needed?

• Use-case = Complexity

– Maximize reuse:

• Standard reusable ontologies / Knowledge bases
• Standard reusable VXML libraries
• Standard reusable Grammar libraries,
• Etc.

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What is needed?

• Use-case = R&D Agility

– need to make it easier to vehiculate vendor-specific information