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Introduction

"I would like to travel to Ulm tonight, when is the next train? And how can I get from the train station to the university?" For the employee of the train information a routine question, for enthusiasts in research and industry a technological challenge. Human-computer interfaces based on spoken natural language dialogues are conceived and tested in the "Dialogue Systems" group which is part of the Information Technology Institute. Since January 2003 Prof. Wolfgang Minker is head of the group "Dialogue Systems" and deputy head of the Information Technoloy Institute. Before, he was member of scientific staff in the DaimlerChrysler Research in Germany.

The "Dialogue Systems" group has placed its research and educational focus on the development and evaluation of human-computer dialogue systems, semantic analysis of naturally spoken language and statistic modelling techniques. The initially quoted orientation problem represents one of the application scenarios for the new generation human-computer interfaces: Computer-assisted processing of naturally spoken language, to provide users an easy access to information and applications.

Why speech?

Spoken language is the primary human communication medium. It's taken so granted for us, that we are normally not concerned about it - we just understand the words and the sentences. But the user still requires primitive aids like keyboard and mouse to control the highly developed computer, which already surpassed human with respect to a variety of abilities. Spoken language is not understood sufficiently by the computer in order to be made available as an exclusive input possibility. However recently, technology achieved product level in some application fields. An increasing number of dictation and naturally spoken language dialogue programmes have become commercially available. They make the automatic speech recognition, i.e. the computer-based conversion of spoken language into text, interesting for the professional as well as for the wide range of private users.

However, the higher levels of speech processing are still mostly reserved to research. Among these are the robust semantic analysis of naturally spoken language, i.e. the textual understanding of a word sequence recognised by machine, and the dialogue ability enabling the system to ask the user questions and to provide him with information. However, the modelling of these specific levels allows to develop totally new forms of interaction and application fields of spoken language technology.