We describe a novel domain, Fruit Carts, aimed at eliciting human language production for the twin purposes of (a) dialogue system research and development and (b) psycholinguistic research. Fruit Carts contains five tasks: choosing a cart, placing it on a map, painting the cart, rotating the cart, and filling the cart with fruit. Fruit Carts has been used for research in psycholinguistics and in dialogue systems. Based on these experiences, we discuss how well the Fruit Carts domain meets four desired features: unscripted, context-constrained, controllable difficulty, and separability into semi-independent subdialogues. We describe the domain in sufficient detail to allow others to replicate it; researchers interested in using the corpora themselves are encouraged to contact the authors directly.

Abstract The generation of referring expressions is a central topic in computational linguistics. Natural referring expressions – both definite references like ‘the baseball cap’ and pronouns like ‘it’ – are dependent on discourse context. We examine the practical implications of context-dependent referring expression generation for the design ofspoken systems. Currently, not all spoken systems have the goal of generating natural referring expressions. Many researchers believe that the context-dependency of natural referring expressions actually makes systemslessusable. Using the dual-task paradigm, we demonstrate that generating natural referring expressions that are dependent on discourse context reduces cognitive load. Somewhat surprisingly, we also demonstrate that practice does not improve cognitive load in systems that generate consistent (context-independent) referring expressions. We discuss practical implications for spoken systems as well as other areas of referring expression generation.

The prevalent state of the art in spoken language understanding by spoken dialog systems is both modular and whole-utterance. It is modular in that incoming utterances are processed by independent components that handle different aspects, such as acoustics, syntax, semantics, and intention / goal recognition. It is whole-utterance in that each component completes its work for an entire utterance prior to handing off the utterance to the next component. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that humans do not process language that way. Rather, people process speech by rapidly integrating constraints from multiple sources of knowledge and multiple linguistic levels incrementally, as the utterance unfolds. In this paper we describe ongoing work aimed at developing an architecture that will allow machines to understand spoken language in a similar way. This revolutionary approach is promising for two reasons: 1) it more accurately reflects contemporary models of human language understanding, and 2) it results in empirical improvements including increased parsing performance.

As speech interfaces become more prevalent, it i s becoming more crucial that they be developed in a way that minimizes cognitive load for users. One major barrier to creating systems that are more human-centered has been the lack of an accepted online methodology for directly evaluating the cognitive resource demands of different systems. The present study extends a classic tool from cognitive psychology, the dual-task paradigm, to speech interface evaluation. Participants follow simple instructions generated by a system, while simultaneously monitoring for a simple visual probe. Performance on the monitoring task is used as a measure of cognitive resource demands; whenever language understanding is more demanding, performance on the monitoring task suffers. In the present study we used this methodology to investigate patterns of reference generation and how they impact human understanding.

We present experimental evidence from a study in which we monitor eye movements as people respond to pre-recorded instructions generated by a human speaker and by two text-tospeech synthesizers. We replicate findings demonstrating that people process human speech incrementally, making partial commitments as a word unfolds. Specifically, they entertain multiple lexical candidates on the fly depending on segmental overlap in the candidate set. Importantly, incremental understanding is also observed for synthesized text-to-speech instructions. These results, including some suggestive differences in responses with the two text-to-speech systems, establish the potential for using eye-tracking methodology together with synthesized speech stimuli as a powerful theoretical and experimental tool for spoken language processing research. 1. BACKGROUND Spoken utterances unfold over time, and psycholinguistic studies of natural speech have shown that the time course of spoken language results in a stream of temporary ambiguities at

Americanae nace como un proyecto conjunto que surge dentro de la Red Europea de Información y Documentación sobre América Latina (REDIAL), y que ha afrontado la Biblioteca de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID). Esta nueva biblioteca virtual hace más accesibles los libros digitales de tema americanista a los investigadores y usuarios interesados de cualquier parte del mundo.