The Interaction of Word Recognition and Linguistic Processing in Speech Understanding

Abstract

This contribution describes an approach to integrate a speech understanding and dialog system into a homogeneous architecture based on semantic networks. The definition of the network as well as its use in speech understanding is described briefly. A scoring function for word hypotheses meeting the requirements of a graph search algorithm is presented. The main steps of the linguistic analysis, i.e. syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, are described and their realization in the semantic network is shown. The processing steps alternating between data- and model-driven phases are outlined using an example sentence which demonstrates a tight interaction between word recognition and linguistic processing.