The Waxholm dialog project General overview We are building a generic system in which speech synthesis and speech recognition can be studied in a man-machine dialogue framework. In addition, the system should facilitate the collection of speech and text data that are required for the development of the system. The demonstrator application, that we call WAXHOLM, gives information on boat traffic in the Stockholm archipelago. A fleet of some twenty boats from the Waxholm company connect about two hundred ports. Different days of the week have different time tables. Besides the speech recognition and synthesis components, the system contains modules that handle graphic information such as pictures, maps, charts, and time-tables. This information can be presented to the user at his/her request. The application has great similarities to the ATIS domain within the ARPA community and other similar tasks in Europe, for example SUNDIAL. The possibility to expand the task in many directions is an advantage for our future research on interactive dialogue systems. An initial version of the system based on text input has been running since September 1992. Since January 1995 the system is running with speech recognition as input, the speech synthesis is complemented with a face-synthesis module and a graphical interface is incorporated. The dialogue system is implemented as a number of independent and specialized modules that run as servers on our computer system. A notation has been defined to control the information flow between them. The structure makes it possible to run the system in parallel on different machines and facilitates the implementation and testing of alternate models within the same framework. The communication software is based on UNIX de facto standards, which will facilitate the reuse and portability of the components. References Carlson, R. and Hunnicutt, S. (1992): " STINA: A probabilistic parser for speech recognition," FONETIK'92, Sixth Swedish Phonetics Conference, May 20-22, 1992, Chalmers Technical Report No 10, Department of Information Theory, Chalmers University of Technology, pp. 23-26. (pdf) Blomberg, M., Carlson, R., Elenius, K, Granström, B., Gustafson, J., Hunnicutt, S., Lindell, R., Neovius, L. and Nord, L. (1993):" An experimental dialogue system: WAXHOLM," STL-QPSR 2-3/1993, pp. 15-20. (pdf) Carlson, R. (1994): "Recent developments in the experimental "Waxholm" dialog system," ARPA Human Language Technology Workshop, 8-11 March 1994, to be published. (pdf) Carlson, R. and Hunnicutt, S. (1995):" The natural language component - STINA" STL-QPSR 1/1995, pp. 28-49. (pdf) Bertenstam, J. Blomberg, M., Carlson, R., Elenius, K, Granström, B., Gustafson, J., Hunnicutt, S., Högberg, J., Lindell, R., Neovius, L., de Serpa-Leitao, A., Nord, L. and Ström, N. (1995):" Spoken dialogue data collection in the Waxholm project" STL-QPSR 1/1995, pp. 50-73. (pdf) Carlson, R., Hunnicutt, S. and Gustafson, J.(1995):" Dialogue management in the Waxholm system" Proc. Spoken Dialogue Systems, Vigsø (pdf) Bertenstam, J. Blomberg, M., Carlson, R., Elenius, K, Granström, B., Gustafson, J., Hunnicutt, S., Högberg, J., Lindell, R., Neovius, L., de Serpa-Leitao, A., Nord, L. and Ström, N. (1995):" The Waxholm system - a progress report" Proc. Spoken Dialogue Systems, Vigsø (pdf) Bertenstam, J. Blomberg, M., Carlson, R., Elenius, K, Granström, B., Gustafson, J., Hunnicutt, S., Högberg, J., Lindell, R., Neovius, L., de Serpa-Leitao, A., Nord, L. and Ström, N. (1995) "The Waxholm Application Data-Base", Proc of Eurospeech '95 vol1 pp 833-836 , Madrid, 1995 (pdf) Carlson, R. (1996):"The Dialog Component in the Waxholm System", Proc. Twente Workshop on Language Technology (TWLT11) Dialogue Management in Natural Language Systems, University of Twente, the Netherlands (pdf) Carlson R & Hunnicutt S. (1996):"Generic and domain-specific aspects of the Waxholm NLP and Dialog modules". Proc of ICSLP-96, 4th Intl Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Philadelphia, USA, Oct 3-6, 1996 (pdf) Carlson R & Granström B (1996). The Waxholm spoken dialogue system. In: Palková Z, ed. Phonetica Pragensia IX. Charisteria viro doctissimo Premysl Janota oblata. Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica 1; 39-52. (pdf)