What's in an ontology for spoken language understanding
Silvia Quarteroni, Giuseppe Riccardi, Marco Dinarelli · 2009
Current Spoken Language Understanding systems rely either on hand-written semantic grammars or on flat attribute-value se-quence labeling. In both approaches, concepts and their rela-tions (when modeled at all) are domain-specific, thus making it difficult to expand or port the domain model. To address this issue, we introduce: 1) a domain model based on an ontology where concepts are classified into either predicative or argumentative; 2) the modeling of relations be-tween such concept classes in terms of classical relations as defined in lexical semantics. We study and analyze our ap-proach on a corpus of customer care data, where we evaluate the coverage and relevance of the ontology for the interpreta-tion of speech utterances. Index Terms: Spoken Language Understanding, domain mod-eling, ontology design, semantic relations