[Ltg] LTG Seminar: [Robert Dale, Oct 11]

[Rolf Schwitter]

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LTG Seminar
 - see: http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/Events/Seminars.html

Monday, October 11, 2004 at 11am
Macquarie Uni, E6A 357
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Speaker: Robert Dale
Title: Talking to Machines

[This is a dry run of a talk I will be giving at a Speech and Language 
Technology Symposium in Perth in mid-November.]

Advances in speech recognition over the last 15 years mean that we can now 
talk to machines, and many of us do so on a daily basis.  In Australia 
today, there are widely used systems that allow anyone with a telephone to 
talk to a machine in order to ask for directory assistance, book a taxi, 
place a bet or buy and sell shares, amongst many other tasks.

The push is for ever-increasing naturalness in voice interfaces, but without 
a clear conception of what 'naturalness' means in these contexts.  In this 
talk, I will look at how people talk to machines, and ask how people should 
talk to machines.  The question that interests me is the extent to which 
this kind of communication can be said to be carried out in natural 
language.  I will argue that, at least in terms of the current behaviour of 
such systems, the medium of communication that is used is not natural 
language.  I will also suggest that, before we try to give such systems the 
ability to communicate in natural language, we first need to have a better 
understanding of what this really means; one possible consequence is that we 
may not want our machines to communicate in natural language after all.