DUMAS

The DUMAS (Dynamic Universal Mobility for Adaptive Speech Interfaces) project develops multi-lingual speech-based applications, focusing on intelligent and ambient interaction management with a special emphasis on naturalness that takes into account the user's personalised needs. Future communication with mobile electronic systems requires dynamic and adaptive capabilities: systems that can learn via interaction and adapt their functionality to different users, situations and tasks, as opposed to the current state of affairs where the systems require the user's adaptation to the system. DUMAS addresses these challenges by integrating research on robust text processing, flexible dialogue management, advanced user interface techniques and dynamic user modelling.

The main ambitious goal in the DUMAS project is to furnish electronic systems with intelligent spoken interaction capabilities. Especially, we will investigate adaptive multilingual interaction techniques to handle both spoken and text input and to provide coordinated linguistic responses to the user.
We will construct Athos, a generic and modular framework for multilingual speech-based application development. The architecture will also be hybrid, utilising components based on different computational paradigms, such as symbolic computation, statistical methods and neural networks. Based on the generic framework and various interaction techniques, we will build AthosMail, an e-mail application that will deal with multilingual issues in several forms and environments, and whose functionality can be adapted to different users, different situations and tasks. To ensure that the implemented methods are general with wide coverage, applicability of the Athos framework will be investigated on other applications, such as speech-based document retrieval, speech user interfaces for SMS messages, text-television and radio stations, and applications for disabled people.

Last update: 010921