Linguistic processing and control strategy in the HWIM speech understanding system

Abstract

The principal source of higher-level linguistic knowledge in HWIM, the BBN speech understanding system, is an augmented transition network parser, which embodies the syntactic, semantic, and part of the factual sources of knowledge of the system. It parses sentences or sentence fragments in either direction, and it can, for a sentence fragment, enumerate the words and syntactic/semantic classes permissible at the ends of the fragment. The control component of the system is a program that calls on the other sources of knowledge of the system in order to formulate, evaluate, and extend hypotheses about the interpretation of the utterance. It is responsible for guiding the system to the most likely interpretation as efficiently as possible. [This research was supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and was monitored by ONR under Contract No. N00014-75-C-0053.]