[Brown CS Talks] Brown CS Colloquium: Allen Gorin in Lubrano on 9/12/02 at 4 pm

[talks-admin@list.cs.brown.edu]

			   BROWN UNIVERSITY

		     COMPUTER SCIENCE COLLOQUIUM

				
			       presents

			     Allen Gorin
			     
		 AT&T Laboratories - Speech Research

		 
		Thursday, September 12,  2002 at 4 pm
	       Lubrano Conference Room (CIT 4th floor)
		Refreshments will be served at 3:45 pm
			      

	  Semantic Information Processing of Spoken Language
		      - How May I Help You? (sm)

			       
			       Abstract


The next generation of voice-based user interface technology will
enable easy-to-use automation of new and existing communication
services, achieving a more natural human-machine interaction.  By
natural, we mean that the machine understands what people actually
say, in contrast to what a system designer expects them to say. This
approach is in contrast with menu-driven or strongly-prompted systems,
where many users are unable or unwilling to navigate such highly
structured interactions.  AT&T's `How May I Help You?' (HMIHY sm)
technology shifts the burden from human to machine wherein the system
adapts to people's language, as contrasted with forcing users to learn
the machine's jargon. We have developed algorithms which learn to
extract meaning from fluent speech via automatic acquisition and
exploitation of salient words, phrases and grammar fragments from a
corpus. In this talk I will describe the speech, language and dialog
technology underlying HMIHY, plus experimental evaluations on live
customer traffic from AT&T's national deployment of HMIHY for
customer care.


		   Host: Professor Eugene Charniak