Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Speech-enabled interfaces are especially useful in mobile devices due to the limited display and keyboard sizes. Despite the steady growth in the adoption of mobile devices in people's daily lives, and the prodigious progress of speech and language technologies, current systems are still a great distance away from providing satisfaction to users. In this program, new research directions are investigated in order to face this challenge. At low-level processing, cooperative approaches combining conventional and soft computing methods are proposed in various speech enhancement schemes to give speech recognition the ability to cope with adverse conditions. Soft computing is inspired by biological systems that are capable of dealing with uncertainty and imprecision to achieve robustness, tractability and optimal solutions. At high-level processing, current research still faces the challenge of giving dialogue systems the ability to perfectly understand the user intents within a few dialogue turns. The strategy consists of leveraging knowledge in distributed ontologies to reduce confusability and ambiguity and to provide a reliable semantic confidence measure through a new concept of ""ontological distance"". Both low-level and high-level processing are integrated in realistic applications by taking advantage of cloud computing and by providing versions for mobile operating systems. The first field of applications consists of allowing human operators to communicate verbally with Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) devices and information systems. Hands-free speech systems combined with RFID technology are expected to improve the speed and safety of numerous business operations such as monitoring assets and shipping. The second field of applications will focus on online role playing games (RPGs), where an actor is mainly constructed through interactions with non-playing characters (NPCs). Our application will provide the option of interacting verbally with NPCs. Adding this feature will upgrade the gaming experience to a new level of intensity. The new frameworks will also be integrated in speech-enabled interfaces with the aim of enhancing the communication of both French and English-speaking users suffering from various speech disorders.