Webtalk: Towards Automatically Building Spoken Dialog Systems Through Miningwebsites

WebTalk is a system for analyzing unstructured information from company Websites to support automatic creation of spoken dialog applications. The goal is to completely automate the process of building, maintaining and deploying dialog applications by leveraging the wealth of information on the World Wide Web. WebTalk employs technologies in Web mining, document understanding, question/answering, and speech and language processing. In this paper, we review extensions to these technologies to make them suitable for creating a WebTalk application. We present an evaluation study of a WebTalk spoken dialog system that has been instantiated on a telecom company Website. Experiments with 30 different scenarios indicate promising results and provide evidence that such systems can potentially revolutionize the paradigm for creating and scaling spoken dialog services