Method and system for prompt construction for selection from a list of acoustically confusable items in spoken dialog systems

摘要

A method (and system) of determining confusable list items and resolving this confusion in a spoken dialog system includes receiving user input, processing the user input and determining if a list of items needs to be played back to the user, retrieving the list to be played back to the user, identifying acoustic confusions between items on the list, changing the items on the list as necessary to remove the acoustic confusions, and playing unambiguous list items back to the user.

主权项

1. A method of providing a list of items in a spoken dialog system comprising a plurality of disambiguation strategies, said method comprising:
receiving input speech; processing said input speech to determine if a clarification of the input speech is desired because the spoken dialog system has returned at least two speech recognition hypotheses having similar confidence values for at least a portion of the input speech; retrieving, if clarification is desired, a first list of items to be played back to the user; identifying acoustically confusable items on said first list of items using at least one measure of confusability; selecting, based, at least in part, on at least one rule in a collection of rules of the spoken dialog system, a disambiguation strategy from the plurality of disambiguation strategies, wherein at least two of the disambiguation strategies in the plurality of disambiguation strategies each includes presenting at least two choices to the user and asking the user to select one of the at least two choices, wherein the plurality of disambiguation strategies includes a first disambiguation strategy comprising spelling at least a portion of each of at least two of the items in the first list of items and a second disambiguation strategy comprising repeating at least two of the items in the first list of items and identifying a first letter of a word in each of the at least two of the items; generating a disambiguated list of items by modifying at least one of said acoustically confusable items on said first list according to said selected disambiguation strategy; and playing a prompt comprising the disambiguated list of items back to the user.