ISCA Archive ICSLP 2002
ISCA Archive ICSLP 2002

Selective back-off smoothing for incorporating grammatical constraints into the n-gram language model

Tomoyosi Akiba, Katunobu Itou, Atsushi Fujii, Tetsuya Ishikawa

Spoken queries submitted to question answering systems usually consist of query contents (e.g. about newspaper articles) and frozen patterns (e.g. WH-words), which can be modeled with N-gram models and grammar-based models, respectively. We propose a method to integrate those different types of models into a single N-gram model. We represent the two types of language models in a single word network. However, common smoothing methods, which are effective for N-gram models, decrease grammatical constraints for frozen patterns. For this problem, we propose a selective back-off smoothing method, which controls a degree to which smoothing is applied depending the network fragment. Additionally, resulting models are compatible with the conventional back-off N-gram models, and thus existing N-gram decoders can easily be used. We show the effectiveness of our method by way of experiments.