PARLANCE is a three-year FP7 EC-funded research project that aims to design and build mobile applications that approach human performance in conversational interaction.
Current search engines work well only if the user has a single search goal and does not have multiple trade-offs to explore. For example, standard search works well if you want to know the phone number of a specific business but poorly if you are looking for a house with several different search criteria of varying importance, e.g. number of bedrooms versus bathrooms versus price etc. The latter requires the user to collaborate conversationally over several turns.
To approach human performance requires interactional skills, which include recognising and generating conversational speech incrementally in real-time, adapting to new concepts without manual intervention, and personalising interaction. All of these skills will be learned or adapted using real data, and will be used to build systems for interactive hyper-local search in a number of languages.
Recent News
The PARLANCE App has arrived!*No longer available on the app store*The PARLANCE app is now available for download in Google Play app store. To get Speak&Eat, San Francisco click here.
Posted 10 Nov 2015, 06:27 by Helen Hastie
SemDial 2014PARLANCE helped host SemDial 2014, held earlier this month at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh.Full details can be found here
Posted 20 Jan 2015, 05:28 by Helen Hastie
SIGDIAL conference in PhiladelphiaPARLANCE had excellent presence at the SIGDIAL conference in Philadelphia. With Helen Hastie as technical chair and Steve Young of the University of Cambridge giving the well-received keynote speech, as well as a panel and demo. The proceedings can be found here.
Posted 20 Jan 2015, 05:28 by Helen Hastie
We've updated our appwe've updated our app*** New *** updated app video demo
Posted 29 Mar 2014, 03:12 by Sandra Birch
