From communicative context to speech: Integrating dialogue processing, speech production and natural language generation

The current article discusses the problem of appropriate intonation selection in Person-Machine dialogues, such as those expected in intelligent information systems when, for example, information retrieval is required. An approach is proposed which integrates the previously mostly separate paradigms of automatic natural language generation and speech synthesis in a Person-Machine dialogue scenario. The article introduces the two independent basis components adopted in the approach - a dialogue model for information retrieval (COR) and a text generation system for German (KOMET-PENMAN) - and develops from these a communicative-context-to-speech system architecture. This system provides for the flexible and context-appropriate selection of intonation patterns. The paper argues that such an approach removes some of the well-known gaps in both text-to-speech and concept-to-speech systems.