2015 Volume 2015 Issue AM-11 Pages 05-
Passive information consumption would an adequate type of information behavior for receiving the content of, for example, a news article. It may however be boring in many cases and even painful in some cases, especially when the information content is delivered by employing speech media. The user of a speech-based information delivery system, for example a text-to-speech system, usually cannot interrupt the ongoing information flow, inhibiting her/him to confirm some part of the content, or to pose an inquiry for further information seeking. We thus argue that spoken dialogue is a suitable media for enabling interactive information access that coordinate passive information consumption and active information seeking. This paper shows that a carefully designed spoken dialog system could remedy these undesirable situations, and further enables an enjoyable conversation with the users. The key technologies to realize such an attractive speech-based interactive information access system are: (1) pre-compilation of a dialog plan based on the analysis of a source content, and (2) the dynamic recognition of user's state of understanding and interests during the course of conversation. This paper illustrates technical views to implement these functionalities, and discusses a dialog example to exemplify our approach.
