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Amazon's Alexa is now widely available and shows interesting potential as a platform for hosting CALL games aimed at children. In this paper, we describe an initial informal experiment where we created some simple CALL games and made them available to a few child testers. We report the children's and parents' reactions. Our overall conclusion is that, although Alexa has many positive features, there are still fundamental platform issues in the current version that make it very difficult to build compelling CALL games for children. The games used will soon be freely available for download on the Alexa store., Comment: 4 pages. Based on talk given at enetCollect WG3 & WG5 Meeting, Leiden, Holland, 2018

We discuss the organisation of internet communities, focusing on what we call the principle of "bait and switch": founders of internet communities often find it advantageous to recruit members by promising inducements which are later not honoured. We look at some of the dilemmas and ways of attempting to resolve them through two paradigmatic examples, Wikispaces and Wordpress. Our analysis is to a large extent motivated by the demands of CALLector, a university-centred social network we are in the process of establishing. We consider the question of what ethical standards are imposed on universities engaged in this type of activity., Comment: 6 pages. Paper based on talk at enetCollect WG3 & WG5 Meeting, Leiden 2018

We present a brief overview of the CALLector project, and consider ethical questions arising from its overall goal of creating a social network to support creation and use of online CALL resources. We argue that these questions are best addressed in a decentralised, pluralistic open source architecture., Comment: 6 pages; based on talk presented at enetCollect WG3 & WG5 Meeting, Leiden, Holland, 2018

We present a new platform, "Regulus Lite", which supports rapid development and web deployment of several types of phrasal speech translation systems using a minimal formalism. A distinguishing feature is that most development work can be performed directly by domain experts. We motivate the need for platforms of this type and discuss three specific cases: medical speech translation, speech-to-sign-language translation and voice questionnaires. We briefly describe initial experiences in developing practical systems., Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, to appear in Proc. Future and Emerging Trends in Language Technology 2015, Seville, Spain

We describe an architecture for spoken dialogue interfaces to semi-autonomous systems that transforms speech signals through successive representations of linguistic, dialogue, and domain knowledge. Each step produces an output, and a meta-output describing the transformation, with an executable program in a simple scripting language as the final result. The output/meta-output distinction permits perspicuous treatment of diverse tasks such as resolving pronouns, correcting user misconceptions, and optimizing scripts.

When people develop something intended as a large broad-coverage grammar, they usually have a more specific goal in mind. Sometimes this goal is covering a corpus; sometimes the developers have theoretical ideas they wish to investigate; most often, work is driven by a combination of these two main types of goal. What tends to happen after a while is that the community of people working with the grammar starts thinking of some phenomena as ``central'', and makes serious efforts to deal with them; other phenomena are labelled ``marginal'', and ignored. Before long, the distinction between ``central'' and ``marginal'' becomes so ingrained that it is automatic, and people virtually stop thinking about the ``marginal'' phenomena. In practice, the only way to bring the marginal things back into focus is to look at what other people are doing and compare it with one's own work. In this paper, we will take two large grammars, XTAG and the CLE, and examine each of them from the other's point of view. We will find in both cases not only that important things are missing, but that the perspective offered by the other grammar suggests simple and practical ways of filling in the holes. It turns out that there is a pleasing symmetry to the picture. XTAG has a very good treatment of complement structure, which the CLE to some extent lacks; conversely, the CLE offers a powerful and general account of adjuncts, which the XTAG grammar does not fully duplicate. If we examine the way in which each grammar does the thing it is good at, we find that the relevant methods are quite easy to port to the other framework, and in fact only involve generalization and systematization of existing mechanisms., Comment: 5th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms. 25-27 May 2000, Paris, France

Speech is becoming increasingly popular as an interface modality, especially in hands- and eyes-busy situations where the use of a keyboard or mouse is difficult. However, despite the fact that many have hailed speech as being inherently usable (since everyone already knows how to talk), most users of speech input are left feeling disappointed by the quality of the interaction. Clearly, there is much work to be done on the design of usable spoken interfaces. We believe that there are two major problems in the design of speech interfaces, namely, (a) the people who are currently working on the design of speech interfaces are, for the most part, not interface designers and therefore do not have as much experience with usability issues as we in the CHI community do, and (b) speech, as an interface modality, has vastly different properties than other modalities, and therefore requires different usability measures., Comment: Position paper for CHI 2000 Workshop on Natural-Language Interaction

Systems now exist which are able to compile unification grammars into language models that can be included in a speech recognizer, but it is so far unclear whether non-trivial linguistically principled grammars can be used for this purpose. We describe a series of experiments which investigate the question empirically, by incrementally constructing a grammar and discovering what problems emerge when successively larger versions are compiled into finite state graph representations and used as language models for a medium-vocabulary recognition task., Comment: To be published in COLING 2000

We describe an architecture for implementing spoken natural language dialogue interfaces to semi-autonomous systems, in which the central idea is to transform the input speech signal through successive levels of representation corresponding roughly to linguistic knowledge, dialogue knowledge, and domain knowledge. The final representation is an executable program in a simple scripting language equivalent to a subset of Cshell. At each stage of the translation process, an input is transformed into an output, producing as a byproduct a "meta-output" which describes the nature of the transformation performed. We show how consistent use of the output/meta-output distinction permits a simple and perspicuous treatment of apparently diverse topics including resolution of pronouns, correction of user misconceptions, and optimization of scripts. The methods described have been concretely realized in a prototype speech interface to a simulation of the Personal Satellite Assistant., Comment: Working notes from AAAI Spring Symposium

In this paper we describe how the translation methodology adopted for the Spoken Language Translator (SLT) addresses the characteristics of the speech translation task in a context where it is essential to achieve easy customization to new languages and new domains. We then discuss the issues that arise in any attempt to evaluate a speech translator, and present the results of such an evaluation carried out on SLT for several language pairs., Comment: 10 pages, needs aclap.sty. To appear in Spoken Language Translation workshop at (E)ACL-97

We describe two methods relevant to multi-lingual machine translation systems, which can be used to port linguistic data (grammars, lexicons and transfer rules) between systems used for processing related languages. The methods are fully implemented within the Spoken Language Translator system, and were used to create versions of the system for two new language pairs using only a month of expert effort., Comment: 6 pages, needs aclap.sty. To appear in "From Research to Commercial Applications" workshop at ACL-97, see also http://www.cam.sri.com

The paper presents an overview of the Spoken Language Translator (SLT) system's hybrid language-processing architecture, focussing on the way in which rule-based and statistical methods are combined to achieve robust and efficient performance within a linguistically motivated framework. In general, we argue that rules are desirable in order to encode domain-independent linguistic constraints and achieve high-quality grammatical output, while corpus-derived statistics are needed if systems are to be efficient and robust; further, that hybrid architectures are superior from the point of view of portability to architectures which only make use of one type of information. We address the topics of ``multi-engine'' strategies for robust translation; robust bottom-up parsing using pruning and grammar specialization; rational development of linguistic rule-sets using balanced domain corpora; and efficient supervised training by interactive disambiguation. All work described is fully implemented in the current version of the SLT-2 system., Comment: 4 pages, uses icassp97.sty; to appear in ICASSP-97; see http://www.cam.sri.com for related material

We describe how substantial domain-independent language-processing systems for French and Spanish were quickly developed by manually adapting an existing English-language system, the SRI Core Language Engine. We explain the adaptation process in detail, and argue that it provides a fairly general recipe for converting a grammar-based system for English into a corresponding one for a Romance language., Comment: 9 pages, aclap.sty; to appear in NLP+IA 96; see also http://www.cam.sri.com/

We show how a general grammar may be automatically adapted for fast parsing of utterances from a specific domain by means of constituent pruning and grammar specialization based on explanation-based learning. These methods together give an order of magnitude increase in speed, and the coverage loss entailed by grammar specialization is reduced to approximately half that reported in previous work. Experiments described here suggest that the loss of coverage has been reduced to the point where it no longer causes significant performance degradation in the context of a real application., Comment: 8 pages LaTeX, ACL-96, needs aclap.sty; see also http://www.cam.sri.com/

The paper argues the importance of high-quality translation for spoken language translation systems. It describes an architecture suitable for rapid development of high-quality limited-domain translation systems, which has been implemented within an advanced prototype English to French spoken language translator. The focus of the paper is the hybrid transfer model which combines unification-based rules and a set of trainable statistical preferences; roughly, rules encode domain-independent grammatical information and preferences encode domain-dependent distributional information. The preferences are trained from sets of examples produced by the system, which have been annotated by human judges as correct or incorrect. An experiment is described in which the model was tested on a 2000 utterance sample of previously unseen data., Comment: 7 pages, LaTeX (2.09 preferred); eaclap.sty; Procs of IA '95 (Montpellier, France)

The Spoken Language Translator is a prototype for practically useful systems capable of translating continuous spoken language within restricted domains. The prototype system translates air travel (ATIS) queries from spoken English to spoken Swedish and to French. It is constructed, with as few modifications as possible, from existing pieces of speech and language processing software. The speech recognizer and language understander are connected by a fairly conventional pipelined N-best interface. This paper focuses on the ways in which the language processor makes intelligent use of the sentence hypotheses delivered by the recognizer. These ways include (1) producing modified hypotheses to reflect the possible presence of repairs in the uttered word sequence; (2) fast parsing with a version of the grammar automatically specialized to the more frequent constructions in the training corpus; and (3) allowing syntactic and semantic factors to interact with acoustic ones in the choice of a meaning structure for translation, so that the acoustically preferred hypothesis is not always selected even if it is within linguistic coverage., Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX. Published: Proceedings of TWLT-8, December 1994

This report describes the research, design and implementation work carried out in building the CLARE system at SRI International, Cambridge, England. CLARE was designed as a natural language processing system with facilities for reasoning and understanding in context and for generating cooperative responses. The project involved both further development of SRI's Core Language Engine (Alshawi, 1992, MIT Press) natural language processor and the design and implementation of new components for reasoning and response generation. The CLARE system has advanced the state of the art in a wide variety of areas, both through the use of novel techniques developed on the project, and by extending the coverage or scale of known techniques. The language components are application-independent and provide interfaces for the development of new types of application., Comment: 250 pages, uuencoded compressed tar-ed LaTeX. Written 1992

Most spoken language translation systems developed to date rely on a pipelined architecture, in which the main stages are speech recognition, linguistic analysis, transfer, generation and speech synthesis. When making projections of error rates for systems of this kind, it is natural to assume that the error rates for the individual components are independent, making the system accuracy the product of the component accuracies. The paper reports experiments carried out using the SRI-SICS-Telia Research Spoken Language Translator and a 1000-utterance sample of unseen data. The results suggest that the naive performance model leads to serious overestimates of system error rates, since there are in fact strong dependencies between the components. Predicting the system error rate on the independence assumption by simple multiplication resulted in a 16\% proportional overestimate for all utterances, and a 19\% overestimate when only utterances of length 1-10 words were considered., Comment: 10 pages, Latex source. To appear in Proc. ICSLP '94

A simple and general method is described that can combine different knowledge sources to reorder N-best lists of hypotheses produced by a speech recognizer. The method is automatically trainable, acquiring information from both positive and negative examples. Experiments are described in which it was tested on a 1000-utterance sample of unseen ATIS data., Comment: 13 pages, Latex source. To appear in Proc. HLT '94

The thesis describes a logical formalization of natural-language database interfacing. We assume the existence of a ``natural language engine'' capable of mediating between surface linguistic string and their representations as ``literal'' logical forms: the focus of interest will be the question of relating ``literal'' logical forms to representations in terms of primitives meaningful to the underlying database engine. We begin by describing the nature of the problem, and show how a variety of interface functionalities can be considered as instances of a type of formal inference task which we call ``Abductive Equivalential Translation'' (AET); functionalities which can be reduced to this form include answering questions, responding to commands, reasoning about the completeness of answers, answering meta-questions of type ``Do you know...'', and generating assertions and questions. In each case, a ``linguistic domain theory'' (LDT) $\Gamma$ and an input formula $F$ are given, and the goal is to construct a formula with certain properties which is equivalent to $F$, given $\Gamma$ and a set of permitted assumptions. If the LDT is of a certain specified type, whose formulas are either conditional equivalences or Horn-clauses, we show that the AET problem can be reduced to a goal-directed inference method. We present an abstract description of this method, and sketch its realization in Prolog. The relationship between AET and several problems previously discussed in the literature is discussed. In particular, we show how AET can provide a simple and elegant solution to the so-called ``Doctor on Board'' problem, and in effect allows a ``relativization'' of the Closed World Assumption. The ideas in the thesis have all been implemented concretely within the SRI CLARE project, using a real projects and payments database. The LDT for the example database is described in detail, and examples of the types of functionality that can be achieved within the example domain are presented., Comment: 162 pages, Latex source, PhD thesis (U Stockholm, 1993). Uses style-file ustockholm_thesis.sty