User modeling and Spoken Dialog Management

Research in design, evaluation and modeling of spoken language and multimodal systems. Current research includes user modeling, speech interface design, and optimization of dialog management. Past projects from AT&T include multimodal large directory access (mVPQ), CHildren's Interactive Multimedia Project (ChIMP), DARPA Communicator Project on advanced spoken language systems, ANNIE, one of the first voice-enabled telephony agents systems at AT&T, and Universal Voice Line, one of the first telephony-based speech recognition systems.

Homepage: http://sail.usc.edu/dialog, Advisor: Shrikanth Narayanan.

Current projects:

• Modeling and optimizing user-centric mixed-initiative spoken dialog systems (NSF-CAREER)
• Mission Rehearsal Exercise for virtual training simulations (ICT)
• Journalism of Future (IMSC)

* NSF: National Science Foundation, IMSC: Integrated Media Systems Center, ICT: Institute for Creative Technologies.

Collaborators:

• Roberto Pieraccini (IBM)
• David Traum (USC/ICT)
• Margaret McLaughlin (USC/Annenberg)

*USC: University of Southern California.

Students:

• Jongho Shin(PhD), jonghosh@usc.edu
• Abe Kazemzadeh(PhD), kazemzad@aludra.usc.edu
• Viktor Rozgic(PhD), rozgic@usc.edu

Publications:

• A. Potamianos, S. Narayanan, and G. Riccardi. Adapative categorical understanding for spoken dialog systems. IEEE Trans. Speech and Audio Processing, 2004. URL: http://sail.usc.edu/publications/PoNaRi_understand_Review.pdf.

• Robert Belvin, Win May, Shrikanth Narayanan, Panayiotis Georgiou, and Shadi Ganjavi. Creation of a doctor-patient dialogue corpus using standardized patients. In Proc. LREC, Lisbon, Portugal, 2004.

• Narayanan, S. Ananthakrishnan, R. Belvin, E. Ettaile, S. Gandhe, S. Ganjavi, P. G. Georgiou, C. M. Hein, S. Kadambe, K. Knight, D. Marcu, H. E. Neely, N. Srinivasamurthy, D. Traum, and D. Wang. The transonics spoken dialogue translator: An aid for english-persian doctor-patient interviews. In AAAI Fall Symposium, 2004.

• Abe Kazemzadeh, Sungbok Lee, and Shrikanth Narayanan. Acoustic correlates of user response to errors in human-computer dialogues. In Proc. IEEE ASRU, St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, December 2003. URL: http://sail.usc.edu/publications/asru_2003_abe_usc.pdf

• Shrikanth Narayanan. Towards modeling user behavior in human-machine interactions: Efect of errors and emotions. In ISLE Tagging for multimodal dialogs Workshop, Edingburgh, UK, December 2002. URL: http://sail.usc.edu/publications/ISLE-shri.pdf.

• Jongho Shin, Shri Narayanan,  Laurie Gerber, Abe Kazemzadeh and Dani Byrd, "Analysis of user behavior under conditions in spoken dialogs", ICSLP, September 2002. - Presented at International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) 2002 and awarded the second best student paper(ps).

• S. Narayanan, G. Di Fabbrizio, C. Kamm, J. Hubbell, B. Buntschuh, P. Ruscitti, and J. Wright, ``Effects of dialog initiative and multi-modal presentation strategies on large directory information access", in Proc. of the Intnl Conf. Spoken Lang. Processing, (Beijing, China), pp. 636-639, 2000.

• E. Levin, S. Narayanan, R. Pieraccini, K. Biatov, E. Bocchieri, G. Di Fabbrizio, W. Eckert, S. Lee, A. Pokrovsky, M. Rahim, P.Ruscitti, and M. Walker, ``The AT&T-DARPA Communicator Mixed-initiative spoken dialog system", in Proc. of the Intnl Conf. Spoken Lang. Processing, (Beijing, China), pp. 122-125, 2000.

• G. di Fabbrizio, S. Narayanan, and P. Ruscitti, ``Unifying conversational multimedia interfaces for accessing network services across communication devices'', Proceedings of IEEE Multimedia Expo, 22-04 p1-4, (New York, New York), July 2000.

• R. Pieraccini, E. Levin, W. Eckert, S. Narayanan, "Spoken Language Systems: From theory to practice", Proc. IEEE ASRU Workshop, 1999.

• M. Walker, J. Fromer, and S. Narayanan, "Learning optimal dialogue strategies: A case study of a spoken dialogue agent for email," in Proc. of ACL/COLING 98, (Montreal, Canada), pp. 1345-1351, 1998.

• S. Narayanan, M. Subramaniam, B. Stern, B. Hollister, and C. Lin, "Probing the relationship between qualitative and quantitative performance measures for telecommunication services," in ICASSP 98, vol. 1, (Seattle, WA), pp. 3769-3772, May 1998.