A spoken dialog system for the Dutch public transport information
service
Helmer Strik, Albert Russel, Henk van den Heuvel, Catia
Cucchiarini & Lou Boves
A2RT, Dept. of Language & Speech, University of Nijmegen
P.O. Box 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Int. Journal of Speech Technology, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 121-131.
ABSTRACT
In the Netherlands there is a nationwide premium rate telephone number that can be dialed to obtain information
about various forms of public transport. In 1996 this number was called more than twelve million times. Human
operators managed to handle only about nine million of these calls. In order to make it possible to answer more
of these calls, it was decided to use a spoken dialog system to try and automate part of this service. The part
selected for automation concerns information about journeys between two train stations.
The starting point of our research was an existing German information system. This system was ported
to Dutch. A bootstrapping method was used to collect the data, which in turn were used to improve the system
itself.
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