The “Human Language Technology” (HLT) workshop will bring together researchers and industry experts in the area of speech and language research, technology and applications. The goal of this event is three-fold. Workshop attendees will have the opportunities to learn from leading experts different aspects of human-machine and human-human interaction. Researchers and technologists from different backgrounds will facilitate cross-fertilization of ideas. Industry representatives will share their case studies on what it takes to go from ideas to prototypes and products.

There will be a one-day session with talks on selected research and technology topics and a two-days tutorial on spoken dialog technology. The talks will be given by leading researchers and industry experts in HLT. The speakers will present materials targeting an interdisciplinary audience including Computer Science and Telecommunications “Laurea Specialistica” and PhD students. The two-days tutorial is an opportunity to learn the basics of the technology and architecture of state-of-the-art spoken dialog systems. The tutorial will have both (morning) lectures and (afternoon) lab hands-on sessions.

Registration
Workshop attendance is free.
Limited seats available.
Need to Register and send email to: HLT06-unitn@dit.unitn.it
and select which events to register for.

Workshop Chair
Giuseppe Riccardi, University of Trento

Workshop Co-Chair
Giuseppe Carenini, University of Trento



Technical Program:

September 6th 2006 - Room 108

• Giuseppe Riccardi
  “Talking to computers: from sounds to words, from actions to interactions”, University of Trento
• Giuseppe Di Fabbrizio
  “Stochastic Natural Language Generation", AT&T Labs-Research
• Giuseppe Carenini
  “Interactive Multimedia Summaries of Customer Reviews”, University of Trento
• Paolo Baggia
  “Speech Technologies and Standards”, Loquendo
  
• Paolo Ferragina
  “Next generation search engines”, University of Pisa
  
• Bernardo Magnini
  “Recent Advances in Open Domain Question Answering” ITC - Irst
  
• Piero Cosi
  “Virtual Humans - Embodied Conversational Agents” ,CNR
  
• Umberto Basso
  “The experience of a Human Digital Assistant”, H-Care
  
• Walter Battistetti
  “Speech Technology: from the Lab Prototype to Business applications”, Speech Village

September 7th - 8th 2006 - Room 105

• Giuseppe Di Fabbrizio (AT&T Labs - Research)
  Tutorial: Standards, Tools and Architectures for Natural Language Spoken Dialogue Systems

Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) have been receiving a great deal of attention from the research community and the industry. SDS allow individuals to interact with computer systems using spoken natural language in order to perform specific tasks as they would with human agents. The design and the development of modern conversational systems require integration of interdisciplinary techniques in a general and flexible development framework. This tutorial seeks to educate speech researchers and practitioners to speech design principles, standards, tools, architectures, and protocols in a coherent environment driven by the latest advances in the research forefront and industry trends. The tutorial is divided in four modules organized in two morning lectures and two afternoon hands-on projects with practical assignments.