Theory and Practice in Discourse and Dialogue for Interactive Systems
 
leftside_space.gif (66 bytes)
[ Summary] [Schedule] [ Assignments ] [Bibliography] [Resources] [Requirements] [ Weekly Question Submission ]
[1 ] [ 2 ] [3 ] [4 ] [5 ] [6 ]

Assignment 2
Due: October 5

Introduction to the CSLU toolkit

The point of this assignment is to introduce you to the CSLU toolkit's Rapid Application Developer (RAD) and to make sure that you can get the system installed on your personal computer. It's a short assignment to familiarize you with one of the software tools that you may be using in the rest of the assignments.

  1. If you have a Windows PC that meets the hardware requirements, download and install the CSLU toolkit for your computer. See the CSLU toolkit info page for requirements & instructions. If you don't have access to a computer at home, you will be able to work on the assignment from the ArticuLab (Frances Searle, Rm 2-147). Make sure that if you're going to work from home, you don't wait until the last minute to install the software. Although it's unlikely that you'll run into any problems with the installation, leave time so that you can get help if you do.
  2. RAD comes with a user guide and a number of tutorials. The Object Guide and the Tutorials on this web page (http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/toolkit/docs/2.0/apps/rad/index.html) are a good source for further information.
  3. Go through RAD tutorials 1-3 (of the ones that come with RAD) and build a simple finite-state automaton dialogue system. Nothing more complicated than the applications shown in the tutorials is necessary (a few states will suffice), but we do want you to create your own states and prompts.
  4. Nodes in a RAD dialogue system can be assocciated with Tcl scripts that are called either on when entering or when exiting the node. This allows to build more interesting applications. Read tutorials 6 and 16 from this page and build a small finite state dialogue system that makes use of a Tcl script at one or several nodes.
There will be a tutorial on using the CSLU toolkit and on tcl.

Examples from the tutorial:
  1. example1.rad: very simple; only output
  2. example2.rad: with user input
  3. example3.rad: example for the use of tcl scripts
  4. example4.rad: using a speech recognition grammar (and tcl)
Helpful stuff:
  1. the RAD user guide which is actually more of a tutorial
  2. the RAD object guide
  3. Lots of tutorials on different topics. Especially interesting: tutorial 6 and tutorial 16 on the use of tcl, tutorial 15 on the use of speech recognition grammars
  4. For more info on tcl just google for "tcl tutorial" or "tcl reference" and you will find lots of it.


Hand in: Your RAD files and a short documentation of your dialogue systems.

For this assignment, email your work to Kris (kris AT northwestern DOT edu) no later than class time.