Speech-Based Interactive Information Guidance System using Question-Answering Technique

This paper addresses an interactive framework for information navigation based on document knowledge base. In conventional audio guidance systems, such as those deployed in museums, the information flow is one-way and the content is fixed. In order to make an interactive guidance system, we propose the application of question-answering (QA) techniques. Since users tend to use anaphoric expressions in successive questions, we investigate appropriate handling of contextual information based on topic detection, together with the effect of using N-best information in ASR output. Moreover, we apply the QA technique to generation of system-initiative information recommendation. A navigation system on Kyoto city information was implemented. Effectiveness of the proposed techniques was confirmed through a field trial by a number of real novice users.