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Overview

Olympus is an architecture for spoken dialog system created at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). It is mainly designed to help researchers in conversational agents implement and test their ideas on full systems, without having to build them from scratch.

The Olympus architecture (Bohus et al. 2007) incorporates a number of modules developed at CMU in past and current spoken dialogue systems research projects.

  • Dialogue management is handled by RavenClaw (Bohus & Rudnicky 2009), a task-independent dialogue engine based on the AGENDA dialog manager (Wu & Rudnicky 1999) first introduced as part of the CMU Communicator system.
  • Low-level interaction management (e.g. exact timing of start and end of utterances, handling of interruptions, etc) is performed by the Apollo interaction manager (Raux & Eskenazi 2007).
  • For speech recognition, Olympus currently supports engines from the CMU Sphinx family (Sphinx 2, Sphinx 3, PocketSphinx), and provides an interface for support for other engines.
  • Natural language understanding is done by Phoenix (Ward & Issar 1994), a robust parser based on CFG-like grammars.
  • Natural language generation uses the Rosetta template-based generation system.
  • Kalliope, the synthesis interface, currently allows the use of SAPI 5-compliant TTS engines, CMU's Flite, and the proprietary Cepstral Swift engine.
  • The communication between the different modules is handled by the MIT/MITRE Galaxy Communicator architecture.

Funding for the development of Olympus and the systems that is based on has been provided by a number of sponsors, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for CMU Communicator and CALO, the Office of Naval Research for LARRI, from the National Science Foundation for the Let's Go project (grants number 0208835 and 0741773), and currently the The Boeing Corporation for the Treasure Hunt project.

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Download

The Olympus system and some example applications are accessible through our public subversion repository under a BSD-Derivative open source license for download. For full download instructions see: Download.

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Documentation

We are currently working on writing serious documentation for Olympus. Some of it is already (at least partially) available such as a tutorial and some reference pages. We will post announcements here and on the distribution mailing list as more of it gets completed.

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Questions and Problems

For any additional information, as well as specific questions, send email to the developers mailing list (olympus-developers@@cs.cmu.edu).

Development

Authors

Many many people have contributed to Olympus over the years (including prior to its existence...). The main contributors are:

Other (sometimes significant) contributions have been made by:

Alan W Black Maxine Eskenazi Scott Judy
Andrew Hoskins Brian Langner Matthew Marge
Udhyakumar Nallasamy Alexander I. Rudnicky Jahanzeb Sherwani
Svetlana Stenchikova Yitao Sun

References

Bohus, Dan & Alexander I. Rudnicky (2009), "The RavenClaw dialog management framework: Architecture and systems", Computer Speech & Language

Bohus, Dan & Alexander I. Rudnicky (2003), "RavenClaw: Dialog Management Using Hierarchical Task Decomposition and an Expectation Agenda", Eurospeech 2003

Bohus, Dan; Antoine Raux; Thomas K. Harris; Maxine Eskenazi & Alexander I. Rudnicky (2007), "Olympus: an open-source framework for conversational spoken language interface research", Bridging the Gap: Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technology workshop at HLT/NAACL 2007

Raux, Antoine & Maxine Eskenazi (2007), "A Multi-Layer Architecture for Semi-Synchronous Event-Driven Dialogue Management", IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop

Rudnicky & Wei Xu (December 1999, p. I-337), "An agenda-based dialog management architecture for spoken language systems", IEEE ASRU Workshop

Ward, Wayne & Sunil Issar (1994), "Recent improvements in the CMU spoken language understanding system", ARPA Human Language Technology Workshop

Retrieved from "http://wiki.speech.cs.cmu.edu/olympus/index.php/Olympus"
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