LING 575 - Spoken Dialog Systems
Spring 2015
Syllabus

Days Time (P.M.) Classroom
Thursdays 3:30-5:50 SAV 137

Instructor
Name: Gina-Anne Levow
Email: levow@uw.edu
Office: GUG 418D
Office Hours: Fri: 12:30-1:30pm
or by appointment
Skype or Adobe, too

Course Resources

Course description

The course will cover the theory and practice of spoken dialog systems. The course will have readings and lectures on general techniques and issues in spoken dialog systems, and will use publicly available tools and toolkits to investigate spoken dialog systems. The target will be conversational systems that are more flexible than the typical flight status phone system. Students will work with the components of a typical spoken dialog system pipeline, including speech recognizer grammars, semantic interpretation for inputs, dialog managers and conversational design, and speech output.

Textbook

There is no required textbook. Instead, the course readings will be drawn from contemporary articles and tutorials available online. Helpful background material can also be found in:

Prerequisites:

No specific prerequisites, though prior programming experience will be helpful.

Grading

Homework

Homework assignments will include critical reading assignments and implementation tasks that are narrow in scope and allow you to gain experience with particular spoken dialog systems tools and components.

Presentations

There will be three presentations required during the term.

Projects

Projects may be completed either individually or in small groups (2-3). Examples of possible topics and prior course projects appear here. NOTE: If you are taking this course to satisfy a Linguistics elective requirement, you must complete a project with a substantial linguistic analysis and a corresponding analytic term paper. Please let me know when you select your topic.

Course Mechanics

Additional detailed information on grading, collaboration, incompletes, etc.

Schedule In Progress

Date Topics Readings Assignment
out 		Slides Adobe Connect
Recording
April 2 Intro to Spoken Dialog; Overview J&M 24   Overview Link
April 9 Overview (cont'd)
Dialog System Components I
J&M 24
J&M 9.1,9.2,9.5,9.6 		Enter presentation topics
on GoPost: Due 4/15 		Systems & Components Link
April 16 Components II
VoiceXML 		VoiceXML tutorial ,
mainly Ch. 1,2,4 - others ref 		HW #1 out: Due 4/30
Enter project topics
on GoPost: Due 4/22 		ASR,NLU,VXML Link
April 23 Dialog Management:
Statistical, Information State 		SDS, 2.4 (primary)   Advanced Dialog Management Link
April 30 Specialized Topic Presentations Reco. of Prosody (Yveline)
Info. Structure & Prosody (Ruth)
Turn-taking (Ryan L.) 		  Intro to prosody
Prosody reco.
Turn_taking
Crowdsourced evaluation 		April 30
May 7 Specialized Topic Presentations
Intermediate Project Presentations		 Affect (Abdelrahman)
Sentiment (Xiaosu)
 Intermediate Project Presentations
Critical Reading Assignments 		Affect
Sentiment		 May 7
May 14 Specialized Topic Presentations DA Taxonomies(Joe)
DA recognition(Sameer)
Misrecognitions(Ryan M.)
Non-native speech (Florian) 		Final Project Specifications DA Taxonomy (Joe)
Corrections (Ryan M.)
Non-native (Florian)		 May 14
May 21 Specialized Topic Presentations Incremental Processing (Rebecca)
Reference/Anaphora (Ceara)
Multi-party dialog (John)
Multi-modal dialog (Katie)   		  Reference (Ceara)
Incremental (Rebecca)
Multi-modal (Katie)
Multi-party (John) 		 
May 28 Specialized Topic Presentations Applications: MT(Anca)
Genres: Tutoring (Amy)
Personification (Alex)
Prosody and Information Structure (Ruth), rescheduled 		  Info Struct (Ruth)
MT (Anca)
Persona (Alex)
Tutoring (Amy) 		May 28
June 4 Project Presentations       June 4