JUPlTER: a telephone-based conversational interface for weather information

Author

Zue, Victor ; Seneff, Stephanie ; Glass, James R. ; Polifroni, Joseph ; Pao, Christine ; Hazen, Timothy J. ; Hetherington, Lee

Author_Institution

Lab. for Comput. Sci., MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

Volume

8

Issue

1

fYear

2000

fDate

1/1/2000 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

85

Lastpage

96

Abstract

In early 1997, our group initiated a project to develop JUPITER, a conversational interface that allows users to obtain worldwide weather forecast information over the telephone using spoken dialogue. It has served as the primary research platform for our group on many issues related to human language technology, including telephone-based speech recognition, robust language understanding, language generation, dialogue modeling, and multilingual interfaces. Over a two year period since coming online in May 1997, JUPITER has received, via a toll-free number in North America, over 30000 calls (totaling over 180000 utterances), mostly from naive users. The purpose of this paper is to describe our development effort in terms of the underlying human language technologies as well as other system-related issues such as utterance rejection and content harvesting. We also present some evaluation results on the system and its components

Keywords

geophysics computing; public information systems; speech recognition; speech-based user interfaces; telephony; weather forecasting; JUPlTER; dialogue modeling; language generation; multilingual interfaces; robust language understanding; spoken dialogue; telephone-based conversational interface; telephone-based speech recognition; weather forecast information; Computer interfaces; Glass; Humans; Internet telephony; Jupiter; Natural languages; North America; Robustness; Speech recognition; Weather forecasting;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Speech and Audio Processing, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1063-6676

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/89.817460

Filename

817460