Skip to main content
Log in

The Syrinx Spoken Language System

  • Published:
International Journal of Speech Technology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper describes the Syrinx Spoken Language System (Sylan), an automated dialogue system that is fully integrated with the Syrinx Large Vocabulary Speech Recogniser (Sycon) into the Syrinx SpeechMaster platform. This platform combines speech recognition, natural language processing, dialogue management, telephony and database integration into a robust and flexible Voice User Interface that permits the deployment of natural language dialogue systems in automated call centres. We first describe the architecture of Sylan which, being modular, allows us to build a system whose domain-independent components are reusable from application to application. We then present those components from the point of view of application developers, describing the data structures used by the system and the utilities to build them. The two prototypes that have already been developed using Sylan are briefly presented, and we conclude by drawing the lessons learned along the way and pointing to further research directions.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Abney, S. (1991). Parsing by chunks. In R. Berwick, S. Abney, and C. Tenny (Eds.), Principle-Based Parsing. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 257–278.

    Google Scholar 

  • Abney, S. (1995). Chunks and dependencies: Bringing processing evidence to bear on syntax. In J. Cole, G.M. Green, and J.L. Morgan (Eds.), Linguistics and Computation. Stanford: CSLI Publications, pp. 145–164.

    Google Scholar 

  • Balentine, B. and Morgan, D.P. (1999). Howto Build a Speech Recognition Application: A Style Guide for Telephony Dialogues. San Ramon: Enterprise Integration Group Inc.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bernsen, N.O., Dybkjaer, H., and Dybkjaer, L. (1998). Designing Interactive Speech Systems: From First Ideas to User Testing. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Berry, L. and Estival, D. (2000). Moving on from IVR. Proceedings of OZCHI 2000. Sydney: HSIG, pp. 166–168.

    Google Scholar 

  • EAGLES(1995). Evaluation of natural language processing systems. (EAGLES Document EAG-EWG-PR.2). Geneva: EAGLES.

  • Glass, J.R. (1999). Challenges for spoken dialogue systems. '99. Phoenix, AZ: IEEE.

    Google Scholar 

  • Glass, J.R., Hazen, T.J., and Hetherington, I.L. (1999). Realtime telephone-based speech recognition in the Jupiter domain. '99. Phoenix, AZ: IEEE, pp. 61–64.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gorin, A.L., Riccardi, G., and Wright, J.H. (1997). How may I help you? Speech Communication, 23:113–127.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hagen, E. and Popowich, F. (2000). Flexible speech act based dialogue management. Proceedings of First SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, ACL 2000. Hong Kong: ACL, pp. 131–140.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jelinek, F. (1997). Statistical Methods for Speech Recognition. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, M. (1988). Attribute-Value Logic and the Theory of Grammar. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • King, M. (1999). The 7-step recipe (EAGLES Evaluation Working Group). Geneva: EAGLES. http://issco-www.unige.ch/projects/ eagles/ewg99/7steps.html

    Google Scholar 

  • Marcus, M.P., Santorini, B., and Marcinkiewicz, M.A. (1993). Building a large annotated corpus of English: The Penn treebank. Computational Linguistics, 19(2):313–330.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reiter, E. and Dale, R. (2000). Building natural language generation systems. Studies in Natural Language Processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rudnicky, A.I., Thayer, E., Constantinides, P., Tchou, C., Shern, R., Lenzo, K., Xu, W., and Oh, A. (1999). Creating natural dialogs in the Carnegie Mellon communicator system. '99, Vol. 4. Budapest: SCA, pp. 1531–1534.

    Google Scholar 

  • Samuelsson, C. and Reichl, W. (1999). Aclass-based language model for large-vocabulary speech recognition extracted from part-ofspeech statistics. '99. Phoenix, AZ: IEEE, pp. 537–540.

    Google Scholar 

  • Young, S. and Bloothooft, G. (Eds.). (1997). Corpus-Based Methods in Language and Speech Processing. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Estival, D. The Syrinx Spoken Language System. International Journal of Speech Technology 5, 85–96 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013643017532

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013643017532

Navigation