Objective
The DISC Action aims to take dialogue engineering and its successful commercialisation a significant step forward by pursuing the following specific objectives:
- To carry out a detailed review and investigation of existing practices for a wide range of SLDSs and components development and evaluation.
- To define a detailed current best practice scheme of methods and procedures for SLDSs and components development and evaluation.
- To develop to the stage of industrial applicability a range of concepts, methods and software tools based on ideas and preparatory work at the partner sites.
- To test methods, procedures, concepts and software tools on industrial and applied academic development projects to the extent feasible within the duration of the Action.
The industrial relevance of the expected results are:
- Progress towards the integration of SLDSs best practice into software engineering.
- Improved feasibility assurance of development projects (risk minimisation) and more exact feasibility assessment.
- Improved procedures, methods, concepts and software tools.
- Reduced development costs, accelerated development, improved maintenance and reusability.
- Improved product quality and increased flexibility and adaptability.
- Progress towards the establishment of dialogue engineering standards.
- Improved guarantees to end-users that a product has been developed following best software and cognitive engineering practice. Enabling end-users to objectively assess different systems and components technologies against one another and choose the right product according to quality, price and purpose.
To achieve its objectives, DISC will (i) investigate a broad selection of state-of-the-art SLDSs to identify current practice and pinpoint its deficiencies; (ii) develop, test and disseminate a first reference methodology of best practice procedures and methods, and a toolbox of associated concepts and software tools. Dissemination will be done through workshops, courses for industry, an Industrial Advisory Panel and liaison with industry and relevant ongoing projects. Industrial collaboration and dissemination will be mediated through Elsnet (the European Language and Speech Network).
Software engineering best practice forms a backbone for the training of students in computer science and engineering who will later contribute to the development of computer systems in industry and research. By contrast, no current scheme specialises software engineering best practice to the particular purposes of dialogue engineering, that is, to the development and evaluation of spoken language dialogue systems (SLDSs). DISC aims to develop a first detailed and integrated set of development and evaluation methods and procedures (guidelines, checklists, heuristics) for dialogue engineering best practice as well as a range of support concepts and software tools. The goals of dialogue engineering include optimisation of the user-friendliness (or cognitive engineering) of SLDSs which will ultimately determine their rank among emerging input/output technologies.
DISC will contribute towards establishing dialogue engineering as a sub-discipline of software engineering, able to draw upon the rich variety of existing software engineering tools, methods and resources. As no similar research agenda has yet emerged in the US and Japan, DISC will contribute to placing European SLDSs research and industrial R&D in the international lead. Work will be carried out as an 18 months Concerted Action which draws together some of the main actors in the national and European advanced SLDSs development projects that have been executed during the last decade.
The development and commercialisation of integrated SLDSs is a recent fact. Only within the last few years have SLDSs matured to the point of attracting broad industrial interest. Simple, speaker-independent, telephone-based SLDSs using continuous and spontaneous speech have now become commercially available. More advanced SLDSs are entering the marketplace, as are platforms that support the implementation of novel applications. However, despite unquestionable progress, SLDSs development and evaluation is replete with unknowns and steps that are undersupported in terms of procedures, concepts, theory, methods and software tools. This situation continues to generate uncertainty about the potential of SLDSs technologies, their proper domains of application, their usability, the cost of producing them, their development time and the quality of products in both absolute and comparative terms. A European effort to remedy the situation seems timely and worthwhile given the proven potential of the technology and the fact that European industry is now very actively building up strength in the field.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences computer and information sciences software
- natural sciences computer and information sciences artificial intelligence heuristic programming
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Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Coordinator
5230 Odense
Denmark
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