Position Paper for Workshop on Mobile Access
April 2, 1998
Raymond Lau
mail@raylau.com
Spoken Language Systems Group
http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu
Background
The Spoken Language Systems Group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
is devoted to research that will lead to the development of interactive
conversational systems. These are systems that can interact with users with
natural, spoken language, in order to solve problems interactively, such as
travel planning and geographic navigation. We formulate and test computational
models and develop algorithms that are suitable for human computer interaction
using verbal dialogues. These research results are funneled into the development
of experimental conversational systems with varying capabilities. For example,
our GALAXY system handles queries in three domains: weather, air travel, and
city guide. Our GALAXY architecture uses a Java-enabled web browser as a
graphical user interface and a telephone line for spoken interaction. Our
Jupiter system provides conversational access to weather information on
500+ cities worldwide via a standard telephone.
Relationship to Mobile Access and the Web
Conversational interfaces are critical for providing user-friendly and
intuitive access to information in a mobile environment. Many of our
systems obtain information from a variety of information sources, including
web sites and SQL databases. For example, our Jupiter system obtains
information from several web sites and provides access to this information
over a telephone, which might be a cellular phone. A conversational
interface is the most natural one for a mobile environment.
Research Interests
Voice enabled browsing, in terms of being able to speak links and to
have the page synthesized and spoken, is a valuable objective, particularly
in terms of furthering web accessibility. However, this only replaces
one modality of interaction with another. The underlying access paradigm
remains the same, requiring the user to navigate a complex forest of
links, comparable to using a telephone voice-mail system. A conversational
interface permits the user to obtain the desired information in a more
natural manner and can provide a concise, targetted response to the user's
queries. To further the availability of information via a conversational
interface, much work needs to be done in the area of providing
descriptive meta-data to allow information available on the
web and elsewhere to be more easily indexed, searched, and semantically
interpreted.