ISCA Archive ISCSLP 2006
ISCA Archive ISCSLP 2006

SpeechQoogle: An Open-Domain Question Answering System with Speech Interface

Guoping Hu, Dan Liu, Qingfeng Liu, Renhua Wang

In this paper, we propose a new and valuable research task: opendomain question answering system with speech interface, and first prototype (SpeechQoogle) is constructed with three separated modules: speech recognition, question answering (QA) and speech synthesis. Speech interface improves the utility of QA system, but also brings several new challenges, including 1) distorting effect of speech recognition error; 2) just one answer could be returned; and 3) the returned answer should be understandable just in speech. To conquer these challenges in SpeechQoogle’s construction, we first carefully choose FAQ-based question answering technique for QA module because of its inherent advances and 600,000 QA pairs are collected to support this technique. Then corresponding acoustic model and language model are particularly developed for speech recognition module which promotes the character ACC to 87.17%. Finally, in open-set testing the integrated prototype successfully answers 56.25% spoken questions, which is a quite satisfied and inspiring performance because many potential improving approaches are still unexploited. Keywords: Question Answering, Speech Interface, Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, Information Extraction