Interfacing acoustic models with natural language processing systems
Michael T. Johnson, Mary P. Harper, Leah H. Jamieson · 1998
The research presented here focuses on implementation and efficiency issues associated with the use of word graphs for interfacing acoustic speech recognition systems with natural language processing systems. The effectiveness of various pruning methods for graph construction is examined, as well as techniques for word graph compression. In addition, the word graph representation is compared to another predominant interface method, the N-best sentence list. 1. INTRODUCTION An important research topic in recent years has been the integration of speech recognition systems with language models [2, 8]. Many systems integrate stochastic language models directly into the speech recognizer. However, a structure in which a front-end acoustic recognizer is interfaced to a separate language processing module allows use of more sophisticated parsing techniques and additional semantic and contextual information to aid in speech understanding. The choice of data representations used to accomplish ...