Development of Dialogue Systems for Serbian and Other South Slavic Languages

Dialogue systems are computer systems whose basic purpose is to communicate with the user in a way as similar as possible to natural human conversation (written or spoken). Such systems can combine text, speech and other modes of communication at both input and output. Their area of application is vast, with the most important applications being information service, command-and-control, assistive systems as well as applications in fields such as education and healthcare. Dialogue systems are heavily dependent on language and speech technologies, which is a strategic strength for the project team, since the project team has already developed some of the language and speech technologies for Serbian and some other South Slavic languages. This is especially important in view of the fact that, unlike most other technologies, these technologies cannot be simply imported from abroad, and they have been developed and successfully applied for a relatively small number of languages. Project activities will focus on the following fields: • Automatic speech recognition (ASR), recognition of speaker and emotions in speech, as well as text-to-speech synthesis (TTS). • Spoken language understanding and generation. • Dialogue management. • Development of systems with limited fields of application (information service, command-and-control, assistive systems, systems to be used in the fields of healthcare and education).