ملخص: The commercial viability of automating large scale directory assistance is shown by presenting new results on the recognition of large numbers of different names. Satisfactory recognition performance is achieved by employing a stochastic combination of N-best lists retrieved from multiple user utterances with the telephone database as an additional knowledge source. The strategy is used in a prototype of a fully automated directory information system which is designed to cover a whole country: After the city has been selected, the user is asked for first and last name of the desired person and, if necessary, also for the street or a spelling of the last name. Confidence measures are used for an optimal dialogue flow. We present results of different recognition strategies for databases of various sizes with up to 1.3 million entries (city of Berlin). The experiments show that for cooperative users more than 90% of all simple requests can be automated. Despite the fact that in the field a lot of practical problems like database or lexicon management or acquainting users with the new systems have to be overcome, the authors nevertheless deem the technology to be highly relevant for commercial deployment.

لغة: إنجليزية