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This book describes spoken dialogue systems that act as independent dialogue partners in the conversation with and between users. It presents novel methods for dialogue history and dialogue management.

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Proactive Spoken Dialogue Interaction in Multi-Party Environments describes spoken dialogue systems that act as independent dialogue partners in the conversation with and between users. The resulting novel characteristics such as proactiveness and multi-party capabilities pose new challenges on the dialogue management component of such a system and require the use and administration of an extensive dialogue history. In order to assist the proactive spoken dialogue systems development, a comprehensive data collection seems mandatory and may be performed in a Wizard-of-Oz environment. Such an environment builds also the appropriate basis for an extensive usability and acceptance evaluation.

Proactive Spoken Dialogue Interaction in Multi-Party Environments is a useful reference for students and researchers in speech processing.

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Fundamentals.- Multi-Party Dialogue Corpus.- Dialogue Management for a Multi-Party Spoken Dialogue System.- Evaluation.- Conclusions and Future Directions.

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From the reviews:
"This work contains the results that were obtained for a novel type of spoken-language dialogue system. ... The main goal of the research project described in the book was to develop a dialogue system that appears as an independent dialogue partner in the interaction with two persons. ... The book is excellent from a didactical point of view, too. It is recommended to researchers, teachers and students." (E. Kostolansky, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1206, 2011)

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