LING 575 - Spoken Dialog Systems
Spring 2016
Syllabus

Days Time (P.M.) Classroom
Thursdays 3:30-5:50 SMI 304

Instructor
Name: Gina-Anne Levow
Email: levow@uw.edu
Office: GUG 418D
Office Hours: Tuesdays 12:30-1:15pm
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 oral presentations required during the term, including:

Projects

Projects may be completed either individually or in small groups (2-3). Examples of possible topics and prior course projects appear here. Details of project write-ups and requirements can be found 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
March 31 Intro to Spoken Dialog; Overview J&M 24   Overview Link
April 7 Dialog System Components I J&M 24
J&M 9.1,9.2,9.5,9.6 		Enter presentation topics
on GoPost: Due 4/13 		Systems & Components link
April 14 Components II
VoiceXML 		VoiceXML tutorial ,
mainly Ch. 1,2,4 - others ref 		HW #1 out: Due 4/28
Enter project topics
on GoPost: Due 4/20 		ASR,NLU,VXML link
April 21 Dialog Management:
Statistical, Information State 		SDS, 2.4   Advanced Dialog Management link
April 28 Specialized Topics & Presentations Reco. of Prosody (John)
Turn-taking (Jeff)
Multi-party dialog (Joanna)
Incremental Proc. (Eslam) 		  Full slide deck link
May 5 Specialized Topics & Presentations Recognizing user affect (Nate)
Modeling affect (Katherine)
Sentiment and Subjectivity (Micaela)
Neural Embeddings for Dialog (Gilsinia)		 Critical Reading Assignments (Due 5/4 23:45)
Please remember to also post questions to GoPost
Intermediate Project Report (Due 5/15 23:45) 		Full slide deck link
May 12 Specialized Topics & Presentations Dialog Act Taxonomies (Jason)
Dialog Act Recognition (Ernie)
Miscommunication & Repair (Laurie, George)
Grounding (Thor) 		  Merged slides
DA recognition 		link
May 19 Specialized Topics & Presentations Information Structure & Prosody (Charlie)
Reference, Anaphora & Generation (Vinay & Ethan)
Mixed Initiative (Maria) 		  Structure, Reference & Initiative link
May 26 Specialized Topics & Presentations Persona & Personification (Lauren)
Different User Populations (Elizabeth)
Dialog Genres (Spencer)
Dialog in Applications (Veljko)		   Genres, Apps, Users, Persona May 26
June 2 Final Project Presentations     Merged PDF deck
Email me for Powerpoint decks		 June 2