An Integrated System for Teaching Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology

Kåre Sjölander and Joakim Gustafson

ABSTRACT

Spoken language systems are highly complex and teaching of students in this subject matter and in the underlying technologies could benefit greatly from instructional software. The aim of this work has been to give students hands-on experience via a fully functioning spoken dialogue system as a teaching aid. This dialogue system was built using our toolkit for spoken language technology as a dedicated laboratory environment for students. The system was used in a lab which was part of two courses on spoken language technology given by our department. Students were given some initial guidance on how to modify and extend the system but most of their work was unsupervised. Overall, the laboratory system was a success and we plan to improve and extend it for the coming academic year. Thanks to the rapid prototyping and development character of our toolkit we might even use it and the modules from the system as a software basis for student projects in spoken language technology.