Integration of Speech and Text Processing Modules into a Real-Time Dialogue System

This paper presents a real-time implementation of an automatic dialogue system called 'Senior Companion', which is not strictly task-oriented, but instead it is designed to 'chat' with elderly users about their family photographs. To a large extent, this task has lost the usual restriction of dialogue systems to a particular (narrow) domain, and thus the speech and natural language processing components had to be designed to cover a broad range of possible user and system utterances.