2001 Communicator Evaluation

Introduction

2001 Communicator Evaluation was produced by Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2003S01 and ISBN 1-58563-259-7.

The original goals of the Communicator program were to support the creation of speech-enabled interfaces that scale gracefully across modalities, from speech-only to interfaces that include graphics, maps, pointing and gesture. The original vision of the Communicator systems included the ability of a user, during one 10-minute session, to plan a three-leg trip, with the three flights/legs on three different days, with rental car and hotel in each of the two "away" cities, plus dictating/sending a voice-mail message.

The actual research that led to the data collections in 2000 and 2001 explored ways to construct better spoken-dialogue systems, with which users interact via speech-alone to perform relatively complex tasks such as travel planning. During 2000 and 2001 two large data sets were collected, in which users used the Communicator systems built by the research groups to do travel planning. The researchers improved their systems intensively during the ten months between the two data collections. This distribution consists of all the data from the 2001 collection.

All the Communicator implementations used a common software architecture, called Galaxy-II, which was designed by a research team at MIT and adapted for Communicator in collaboration with a team at MITRE. The architecture supported detailed logging of the interaction between users and the systems.

For possible updated information about the Communicator project and the data distributions, please visit the NIST website.

Data

The following sites participated in this project: ATT, BBN, Carnegie Mellon University, IBM, Lucent Bell Labs, MIT, SRI and University of Colorado at Boulder.

All audio files have been converted into SPHERE format; there are 53394 sphere files, totalling approximately 102 hours of audio. All sphere files are one-channel, 8KHz, but the sample coding and format, while consistent for all files belonging to one site, is not consistent across sites (for example, some sites provided pcm, while others provided u-law data). The documentation included in this distribution is replicated exactly as received from NIST and from the participating sites.

Updates

There are no updates available at this time.

NIST and DARPA have an Interagency Agreement by which funds are transferred to NIST. The funds to support NIST's DARPA Communicator Role were transferred under ARPA Order No. G270.