John Dowding||Robert Moore SRI International||NASA Ames Research CenterCommandTalk: A Spoken-Language Interface to a Battlefield Simulator
October 9, 1998
CommandTalk is a spoken-language interface to synthetic forces
in entity-based battlefield simulations, developed by SRI International
over the last 3 years. The principal goal of CommandTalk
is to let commanders interact with simulated forces by voice
in a manner as similar as possible to the way they would command
actual forces. CommandTalk was initially deployed in LeatherNet,
a simulation and training system for the Marine Corps developed
under direction of the of the Naval Command, Control and Ocean
Surveillance Center, RDT&E Division (NRaD). CommandTalk
was later adapted to support all 4 services, and used in support
of a large distributed joint exercise as part of DARPA's STOW
program.
This talk will focus on the technical aspects of the CommandTalk
architecture, on design decisions made while applying spoken-language
technology to a large legacy application, and on some of the
user's responses to those decisions. While no formal evaluation
of CommandTalk was carried out, we gathered extensive anecdotal
evidence regarding user preferences and user acceptance.
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John Dowding is a Senior Computer Scientist in the Natural
Language group of the Artificial
Intelligence Center at SRI International. John has been the
lead engineer designing the Gemini spoken-language understanding
system and its application in CommandTalk, a spoken-language
interface to a battlefield simulator, and principal investigator
on several related projects. Before joining SRI in 1990,
John was a researcher at Unisys Corporation in the Logic-Based
System group, working on parsing and related issues for the Pundit
text-processing project.
Robert C. Moore is the Director of the Research
Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS), located
at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Before
joining RIACS in 1998, Dr. Moore spent 20 years in artificial
intelligence research at SRI International, where at various
times he served as a Principal Scientist in SRI's Artificial
Intelligence Center, Director of SRI's Natural-Language Research
Program, and founding Director of SRI's Computer Science Research
Centre in Cambridge, England. Dr. Moore has also been a
Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences,
a Visiting Industrial Lecturer at Stanford University, and a
Fellow Commoner of Churchill College, Cambridge. Areas of
Dr. Moore's research have included natural-language processing,
speech understanding, knowledge representation, and automated
reasoning. He has been a Fellow of the American Association
for Artificial Intelligence since 1991, and has served on the
editorial boards of the journals "Artificial Intelligence"
and "Computational Linguistics". His numerous publications
include the recent book "Logic and Representation,"
published by Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language
and Information in 1995.
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