Detecting and Correcting Speech Repairs

Detecting and Correcting Speech Repairs Peter Heeman and James Allen Department of Computer Science University of Rochester Rochester, New York, 14627 {heeman, j ames}@cs, rochester, edu Abstract Interactive spoken dialog provides many new challenges for spoken language systems. One of the most critical is the prevalence of speech repairs. This paper presents an al- gorithm that detects and corrects speech repairs based on finding the repair pattern. The repair pattern is built by find- ing word matches and word replacements, and identifying fragments and editing terms. Rather than using a set of pre- built templates, we build the pattern on the fly. In a fair test, our method, when combined with a statistical model to filter possible repairs, was successful at detecting and correcting 80% of the repairs, without using prosodic information or a parser. Introduction Interactive spoken dialog provides many new challenges for spoken language systems. One of the most critical is the prevalence of speech repairs. Speech repairs are dysfluencies where some of the words that the speaker utters need to be removed in order to correctly understand the speaker's meaning. These repairs can be divided into three types: fresh starts, modifications, and abridged. A fresh start is where the speaker abandons what she was saying and starts again. the current plan is we take - okay let's say we start with the bananas (d91-2.2 uttl05) A modification repair is where the speech-repair modifies what was said before. after the orange juice is at - the oranges are at the OJ factory (d93-19.3 utt59) An abridged repair is where the repair consists solely of a fragment and/or editing terms. we need to -um manage to get the bananas to Dansville more quickly (d93-14.3 utt50) These examples also illustrate how speech repairs can be divided into three intervals: the removed text, the editing terms, and the resumed text (cf. Levelt, (1983), Nakatani and Hirschberg, (1993)). The removed text, which might end in a word fragment, is the text that the speaker intends to replace. The end of the removed text is called the interruption point, which is marked in the above examples as "-". This is then followed by editing terms, which can either be filled pauses, such as "urn", "uh", and "er", or cue phrases, such as "I mean", "I guess", and "well". The last interval is the resumed text, the text that is intended to replace the removed text. (All three intervals need notbe present in a given speech repair.) In order to correct a speech repair, the removed text and the editing terms need to be deleted in order to determine what the speaker intends to say. 1 In our corpus of problem solving dialogs, 25% of turns contain at least one repair, 67% of repairs occur with at least one other repair in the turn, and repairs in the same turn occur on average within 6 words of each other. As a result, no spoken language system will perform well without an effective way to …

Content truncated to 500 words