SIGdial 2014

15th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Dialogue Act Modeling for Non-Visual Web Access

Vikas Ashok, Yevgen Borodin, Svetlana Stoyanchev and IV Ramakrishnan
Speech-enabled dialogue systems have the potential to enhance the ease with which blind individuals can interact with the Web beyond what is possible with screen readers - the currently available assistive technology which narrates the textual content on the screen and provides shortcuts to navigate the content. In this paper, we present a dialogue act model towards developing a speech enabled browsing system. The model is based on the corpus data that was collected in a wizard-of-oz study with 24 blind individuals who were assigned a gamut of browsing tasks. The development of the model included extensive experiments with assorted feature sets and classifiers; the outcomes of the experiments and the analysis of the results are presented.