Towards Automatic Route Description Unification in Spoken Dialog Systems

In telephone-based dialog navigation systems, scheduling and direction information are typically collected from routing APIs in text, and then delivered to users via speech. These systematic directions may be augmented with human descriptions to provide more accurate and personalized routes and cover broader user needs. However, manually collecting, transcribing, correcting, and rewriting human descriptions is time-consuming. Also its inconsistency with systematic directions can be confusing to users when delivered orally. This paper describes the construction of a pipeline to automate the route description unification process which also renders the resulting direction delivery more concise and consistent.