ISCA Archive ICSLP 2002
ISCA Archive ICSLP 2002

Extracting clauses for spoken language understanding in conversational systems

Narendra K. Gupta, Srinivas Bangalore, Mazin Rahim

Spontaneous human utterances in the context of human-human and human-machine dialogs are rampant with dysfluencies, and speech repairs. Furthermore, when recognized using a speech recognizer, these utterances produce a sequence of words with no identification of clausal units. Such long strings of words combined with speech errors pose a difficult problem for spoken language parsing and understanding. In this paper, we address the issue of editing speech repairs as well as segmenting user utterances into clause units with a view of parsing and understanding spoken language utterances. We present generative and discriminative models for this task and present evaluation results on the human-human conversations obtained from the Switchboard corpus.