Toward Widely-Available and Usable Multimodal Conversational Interfaces
Name
547193270-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
31.94 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
2aa99823e418f79c3f91f22dd5576bfc
Author(s)
Gruenstein, Alexander
Advisor(s)
Stephanie Seneff.
Date Issued
2009
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Multimodal conversational interfaces, which allow humans to interact with a computer using a combination of spoken natural language and a graphical interface, offer the potential to transform the manner by which humans communicate with computers. While researchers have developed myriad such interfaces, none have made the transition out of the laboratory and into the hands of a significant number of users. This thesis makes progress toward overcoming two intertwined barriers preventing more widespread adoption: availability and usability. Toward addressing the problem of availability, this thesis introduces a new platform for building multimodal interfaces that makes it easy to deploy them to users via the World Wide Web. One consequence of this work is City Browser, the first multimodal conversational interface made publicly available to anyone with a web browser and a microphone. City Browser serves as a proof-of-concept that significant amounts of usage data can be collected in this way, allowing a glimpse of how users interact with such interfaces outside of a laboratory environment. City Browser, in turn, has served as the primary platform for deploying and evaluating three new strategies aimed at improving usability. The most pressing usability challenge for conversational interfaces is their limited ability to accurately transcribe and understand spoken natural language. The three strategies developed in this thesis - context-sensitive language modeling, response confidence scoring, and user behavior shaping - each attack the problem from a different angle, but they are linked in that each critically integrates information from the conversational context.
Description
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 159-166).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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