Towards speech understanding across multiple languages
Todd R. Ward, Salim Roukos, C. Neti, Jerome Gros, Mark D. Epstein, Satya Dharanipragada · 1998
In this paper we describe our initial eorts in build-ing a natural language understanding (NLU) system across multiple languages. The system allows users to switch lan-guages seamlessly in a single session without requiring any switch in the speech recognition system. Context depen-dence is maintained across sentences, even when the user changes languages. Towards this end we have begun build-ing a universal speech recognizer for English and French languages. We experiment with a universal phonology for both French and English with a novel mechanism to han-dle language dependent variations. Our best results so far show about 5 % relative performance degradation for Eng-lish relative to a unilingual English system and a 9 % rela-tive degradation in French relative to a unilingual French system. The NLU system uses the same statistical un-derstanding algorithms for each language, making system development, maintenance, and portability vastly superior to systems built customly for each language. 1.