First Half-Year 2002

This unit is part of Macquarie's program in Language Technology.

News [2002-05-13] Don't forget that Assignment 2 is due 6pm on Tuesday 14th May. Your email submission must have reached me by this time; you can deliver your hard copy to the reception desk in Computing, or, alternatively, slip it under my office door. It's the time stamp on the mail message that is the determiner of submission time, though. [2002-05-05] See the a Q&A page for an update on the Genie IDE grammar recognition problem. [2002-05-01] There's now a Q&A page for Assignment 2. Submit questions by email and their answers will appear on this page. [2002-05-01] A couple of people have asked for reference material on GSL, the Nuance Grammar Specification Language. You can find a basic tutorial in the Motorola Toolkit: go Help >Help Topics, then look under Grammars > Speech Grammars in the Contents. Let me know if this does not answer all your questions. [2002-04-24] Answers for the grammar exercises are being added: see the links at the bottom of each exercise page. These will appear gradually over the next few days. [2002-04-16] Today's lecture slides are now up on the class schedule page. As before, these are provided in 4-up format; use Acrobat's Zoom-In tool to see details that are obscure in the printed version. [2002-04-12] There are now some grammar exercises available on the web site. Please try to work through these in advance of the class on Tuesday 16th April, and raise any questions or problems you have at the beginning of class. [2002-04-12] VoiceXML versions: You will be aware that different tools support different versions of VoiceXML: the Motorola toolkit, for example, supports VoiceXML 1.0, whereas VoiceGenie and many of the online tools support VoiceXML 2.0. Note that an application developed for one version will not run under an interpreter for another version; at the very least you will have to change the version information at the header of the file, and it is likely that other aspects of your code will not be cross-compatible. Given the problems we have faced with desktop VoiceXML tools, for the assignment, you can submit code in either VoiceXML version. However, you must make clear in your documentation which version you have used. Similarly, you can develop and test your grammars in any of the available formats, provided you make clear in the documentation which grammar format you have used. Note that for testing purposes you can use text input in most tools. Assignments will generally be tested only in text mode, but it makes sense to try your system with voice input as an additional sanity check on naturalness. [2002-04-12] The assignment specification for Assignment 2 has been revised slightly (essentially to take account of the fact that you do not have access to a web server for the extended assignment), and both a dialog design template and a sample dialog design have been added to the page. [2002-04-03] Unfortunately, for some reason I can't determine, the printer driver I am using does not reliably produce 2-up versions of the overheads. So I've gone back to 4-up versions for the moment. If you're not able to read some of the detail in this format, note that if you view the PDFs on-line, then you can use Acrobat Reader's Zoom-In tool to see the detail. Once information here gets a bit stale, it is moved to the Old News page.

Rooms and Times

• Lectures:
• Tuesdays 6:00pm-9:00pm in E6A131
• Lab Sessions:
• Tuesdays 9:00pm-10:00pm in E6A114

Office Hours

Study Guide

• The Study Guide is available as a PDF file. Please read the guide carefully and refer to it as required.

Assignments

• To be announced.

Textbooks And Online Resources

• See the Resources Page.