CommandTalk

CommandTalk is a spoken-language interface to synthetic forces in entity-based battlefield simulations, developed by SRI International under our DARPA-sponsored project on Improved Spoken-Language Understanding. The principal goal of CommandTalk is to let simulation operators interact with synthetic forces by voice in a manner as similar as possible to the way that commanders control live forces. CommandTalk currently interfaces to the ModSAF battlefield simulator and allows the use of ordinary English commands to

Create forces and control measures (points and lines)
Assign missions to forces
Modify missions during execution
Control ModSAF system functions, such as the map display

CommandTalk was initially developed for LeatherNet, a simulation and training system for the Marine Corps developed under direction of the Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center, RDT&E Division (NRaD). Subsequently, CommandTalk was extended to Navy, Air Force, and Army versions of ModSAF, to provide control of all synthetic forces in DARPA's STOW '97 Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration. The Advanced Simulation Technology Thrust (ASTT) program supported further development of CommandTalk to include a dialogue component and to research robustness techniques for interpreting user input.

CommandTalk is implemented within the DASLING (Distributed-Agent Spoken-Language Interfaces based on Nuance and Gemini) framework for interactive spoken-language interface applications. DASLING combines the Nuance speech recognizer (a commercially available system based on SRI-developed technology) with SRI's Gemini natural-language understanding system, using SRI's Open Agent Architecture.

For more information on the CommandTalk system see

Our publications:

"CommandTalk: A Spoken-Language Interface for Battlefield Simulations", 1997, by Robert Moore, John Dowding, Harry Bratt, J. Mark Gawron, Yonael Gorfu and Adam Cheyer, in "Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing", Washington, DC, pp. 1-7, Association for Computational Linguistics
- (GNU-compressed [gz] Postscript - 37700 bytes)
- (Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 122175 bytes)
"The CommandTalk Spoken Dialogue System", 1999, by Amanda Stent, John Dowding, Jean Mark Gawron, Elizabeth Owen Bratt and Robert Moore, in "Proceedings of the Thirty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the ACL", pp. 183-190, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, Association for Computational Linguistics
- (GNU-compressed [gz] Postscript - 40885 bytes)
- (Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 128552 bytes)
"Interpreting Language in Context in CommandTalk", 1999, by John Dowding and Elizabeth Owen Bratt and Sharon Goldwater, in "Communicative Agents: The Use of Natural Language in Embodied Systems", pp. 63-67, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART), Seattle, WA
- (GNU-compressed [gz] Postscript - 23858 bytes)
- (Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 89998 bytes)
"Building a Robust Dialogue System with Limited Data", 2000, by Sharon J. Goldwater, Elizabeth Owen Bratt, Jean Mark Gawron, and John Dowding, presented at the Workshop on Conversational Systems at the 1st Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Seattle, WA.
- paper
  - GNU-compressed [gz] Postscript - 30307 bytes)
  - (Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 109761 bytes)
- presentation slides with additional data
  - GNU-compressed [gz] Postscript - 22636 bytes)
  - (Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 56733 bytes)

Our web resources:

For additional information on CommandTalk see NRaD's CommandTalk site.