​Tutorial Dialogues and Spoken Dialogue Systems.

Over the recent years there has been a growing interest in the development of educational applications that use spoken interaction and dialogue technology. Advances have been expected and achieved in both spoken dialogue community and education research community, and the development of such interactive tutorial systems that use spoken language technology has been further boosted by sophisticated speech and multimodal technology which allows functionally suitable and reasonably robust applications to be built.

 

The time is thus very appropriate to focus on the issues that are shared by both communities contributing to educational spoken dialogue systems, such as sophistication of ASR, TTS, and advanced dialogue management models, integration of spoken language processing with educational interaction, of higher-level dialogue control with theories of emotion, rapport, and mutual understanding, of theories of cognitive science with the representation of the student and the curriculum, as well as advance machine learning techniques, human-robot interaction, novel learning environments, and new evaluation methods.

 

This special session is grounded in research and development that combines spoken dialogue research, interaction modelling, and educational applications. The session will bring together the two Interspeech SIGs: SLaTE and SIGdial. SLaTE promotes the use of speech and language technology for educational purposes, while SIGdial encourages researchers and educators for cutting edge research in various aspects of discourse and 

dialogue. The special session aims to explore in more detail, the challenges and possibilities of synergy between spoken dialogue technology and interactive tutorial applications.