Data collection for the MASK kiosk: WOz vs. prototype system

The MASK consortium is developing a prototype multimodal multimedia service kiosk for train travel information and reservation, exploiting state of the art speech technology. We report on our efforts aimed at evaluating alternative user interface designs and at obtaining acoustic and language modeling data for the spoken language component of the overall system. Simulation methods with increasing degrees of complexity have been used to test the interface design, and to experiment with alternate operating modes. The majority of the speech data has been collected using successive versions of the spoken language system, whose capabilities are incrementally expanded after analysis of the most frequent problems encountered by users of the preceding version. The different data requirements of user interface design and speech corpus acquisition are discussed in light of the experience of the MASK project.