As large-scale deployments of spoken dialog systems in call centers become more common, a wealth of information is gathered about the call center business as well as the operation of these systems from their daily logs. This paper describes the "VoiceTone Daily News" data mining tool for analyzing this information and presenting it in a readily comprehensible and customizable form that is suitable for use by anyone from system designers to call center businesses. Relevant business and dialog features are extracted from the speech logs of caller-system interactions and tracked by trend analysis algorithms. We describe novel techniques for generating alerts on multiple data streams while avoiding redundant "knock-on" alerts. Some initial experiments with automated measures of dialog success are described as possible additional features to track. Features that move outside their expected bounds on a given day generate headlines as part of a website generated completely automatically from each day's logs. A "drill-down" facility allows headlines to be investigated all the way to viewing logs of individual interactions behind the headline and listening to the audio for individual turns.

Data collection and annotation are major bottlenecks in rapid development of accurate syntactic and semantic models for natural-language dialogue systems. In this paper we show how human knowledge can be used when designing a language understanding system in a manner that would alleviate the dependence on large sets of data. In particular, we extend BoosTexter, a member of the boosting family of algorithms, to combine and balance hand-crafted rules with the statistics of available data. Experiments on two voice-enabled applications for customer care and help desk are presented.

The paper defines weighted head transducers, finite-state machines that perform middle-out string transduction. These transducers are strictly more expressive than the special case of standard left-to-right finite-state transducers. Dependency transduction models are then defined as collections of weighted head transducers that are applied hierarchically. A dynamic programming search algorithm is described for finding the optimal transduction of an input string with respect to a dependency transduction model. A method for automatically training a dependency transduction model from a set of input-output example strings is presented. The method first searches for hierarchical alignments of the training examples guided by correlation statistics, and then constructs the transitions of head transducers that are consistent with these alignments. Experimental results are given for applying the training method to translation from English to Spanish and Japanese.

We describe a method for automatically learning head-transducer models of translation from examples consisting of transcribed spoken utterances and their translations. The method proceeds by first searching for a hierarchical alignment (specifically a synchronized dependency tree) of each training example. The alignments produced are optimal with respect to a cost function that takes into account co-occurrence statistics and the recursive decomposition of the example into aligned substrings. A probabilistic head-transducer model is then constructed from the alignments. We report results of applying the method to English-to-Spanish translation in the domain of air travel information and English-to-Japanese translation in the domain of telephone operator assistance. We also report on a variation on this model-construction method in which multi-word pairings are used in the computation of the hierarchical alignments and head transducer models. 1.

Describes a prototype system for assigning table cells to their proper place in the logical structure of the table, based on a simple model of table structure combined with a number of measures of cohesion between cells. A framework is presented for examining the effect of particular variables on the performance of the system, and preliminary results are presented showing the effect of cohesion measures based on the simplest domain-independent analyses, with the aim allowing future comparison with more knowledge-intensive analyses based on natural language processing. These baseline results suggest that very simple string-based cohesion measures are not sufficient to support the extraction of tuples as we require. Future work will pursue the aim of more adequate approximations to a notional subtype/supertype definition of the relationship between value cells and label cells.