Articles

A dynamical system model is proposed for better represent- ing the spectral dynamics of speech for recognition. We assume that the observed feature vectors of a phone segment are the output of a stochastic linear dynamical system and consider two alternative assumptions regarding the relationship of the segment length and …...

The paper presents a new algorithm for estimating the pa- rameters of a hidden stochastic context-free grammar. In con- trast to the Inside/Outside (I/O) algorithm it does not require the grammar to be expressed in Chomsky normal form, and thus can operate directly on more natural representations of a gram- …...

A standard problem in parsing algorithms is Lhe organizaLion o~ branched searches to deal with an~iguous sentences. We discuss shift- reduce parsing o£ stochastic context-Gee granlnmrs and show how Lo construct a probabilistic score for tanking compeLing parse hypotheses. The score we use is the likelihood Lhag the collection of …...

This paper* describes a .al, ural language p~rsi.g algorithm &)r un- resu'icl,ed I,ext which uses a probabilhq-hased scoring funct,iow I,o se- le(:l, I,he "besC: parse of ~/ sent,enos acc:ording t,c~ a given gra0nunar. The parser~ "Pearl~ ix a i,hne-asynciironous t)ol,l,orn-u 1) chart, parser with Earley-l,ype I,Ol)-dowil t)redic:l,ion which pursues I,he …...

The challenge of making cost-effective implementations of auditory models has led us to pursue an analog VLSI micro-power approach. Experiments with the first few generations of analog cochlea chips showed some of both the potential and the problems of this approach. The inherent exponential behavior of MOS transistors in the …...

This paper reports a handful of experiments designed to test the feasibility of applying well-known partial parsing techniques to the problem of automatic data base update from an open-ended source of messages, and the feasiblity of automatically learning semantic knowledge from annotated examples. The challenges arise from the incompleteness of …...

This paper describes a series of experiments aimed at producing a bottom-up parser that will produce partial parses suitable for use in robust interpretation and still be reasonably efficient. In the course of these experi- ments, we improved parse times by a factor of 18 over our first attempt, ending …...

In this paper, we describe the Template Matcher, a sys- tem built at SRI to provide robust natural-language interpretation in the Air Travel Information System (ATIS) domain. The system appears to be robust to both speech recognition errors and unanticipated or dif- ficult locutions used by speakers. We explain the …...

We present the "mapping unit" approach to representing subeategoriza- tion information, a computational framework for encoding subcategorization information which has been developed and implemented for BBN's DEL- PHI system (the NL component of the HARC spoken language system). The advantage of our approach to subeategorization lies in its flexibility, a …...

The study reported in this paper addresses three issues related to phonetic classification: 1) whether it is important to choose an appropriate signal representation, 2) whether there are any ad- vantages in extracting acoustic attributes over directly using the spectral information, and 3) whether it is advantageous to intro- duce …...

Two technological advances support new sophis- tication in sound capture; namely, high-quality low- cost electret microphones and high-speed economical signal processors. Combined with new understand- ing in acoustic beamforming, these technologies per- mit spatially-selective transduction of speech signals several octaves in bandwidth. Spatial selectivity mk- igates the effects of noise …...

Performance estimates given for speech recognition/understanding systems are typically based on the assumption that users will behave in ways similar to the observed behavior of laboratory volunteers. This includes the acoustic/phonetic characteristics of the spcech they produce as well as their willingness and ability to constrain their input to the …...

This paper presents the results of converting a standard Greham/Harrison/Ruzzo (GHR) parser for a unification grammar into an agenda-driven parsing system. The agenda is controlled by statistical measures of grammar-rule likelihood obtained from a training set. The techniques in the agenda parser lead to substantial reductions in chart size and …...

This paper presents, in a first part, the detailed results of several field evaluations of the CNET speaker independent speech recognition system in a context of 2 voice-activatedservers accessible by the general French public over the telephone. The analysis of roughly ll 000 user's tokens indicates that the rejection of …...

We describe ~ statisticM technique for assigning senses to words. An instance of ~ word is assigned ;~ sense by asking a question about the context in which the word ~tppears. The qttestlou is constructed to ha, re high mutua,1 i~fformation with the word's translations....

A natural language interface for relational databases has been utilized at AT&T Bell Laboratories as the natu- ral language component of the DARPA ATIS common task. This is a part of a larger project that consists of in- corporating a natural language component into the Bell Laboratories Speech Recognizer. The …...

We propose a model for a statistical representation of the conceptual structure in a restricted subset of spoken natural language. The model is used for segmenting a sentence into phrases and labeling them with concept relations (or cases). The model is trained using a corpus of annotated transcribed sentences. The …...

This paper describes the initial development of a natural language text processor, as the first step in an INRS dialogue-by-voice system. The eventual system will accept natural, spontaneous speech from users and produce responses from the databases in the form of synthetic speech. This paper reports results in processing the …...

This paper represents a status report on the MIT ATIS sys- tem. The most significant new achievement is that we now have a speech-input mode. It is based on the MIT SUMMIT system us- ing context independent phone models, and includes a word-pair grammar with perplexity 92 (on the June-90 …...

This paper describes a general formalism for integrating two or more speech recognition technologies, which could be devel- oped at different research sites using different recognition strate- gies. In this formalism, one system uses the N-best search strat- egy to generate a list of candidate sentences; the list is rescorred …...