Copyright © 2005 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.
Combining language models in the input interface of a spoken dialogue system
Received 4 February 2004;
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Abstract
This paper presents a new technique to enhance the performance of the input interface of spoken dialogue systems based on a procedure that combines during speech recognition the advantages of using prompt-dependent language models with those of using a language model independent of the prompts generated by the dialogue system. The technique proposes to create a new speech recognizer, termed contextual speech recognizer, that uses a prompt-independent language model to allow recognizing any kind of sentence permitted in the application domain, and at the same time, uses contextual information (in the form of prompt-dependent language models) to take into account that some sentences are more likely to be uttered than others at a particular moment of the dialogue. The experiments show the technique allows enhancing clearly the performance of the input interface of a previously developed dialogue system based exclusively on prompt-dependent language models. But most important, in comparison with a standard speech recognizer that uses just one prompt-independent language model without contextual information, the proposed recognizer allows increasing the word accuracy and sentence understanding rates by 4.09% and 4.19% absolute, respectively. These scores are slightly better than those obtained using linear interpolation of the prompt-independent and prompt-dependent language models used in the experiments.
Article Outline
- 1. Introduction
- 2. The proposed technique: contextual speech recognizer
- 2.1. Previous related work
- 2.2. Word-networks
- 2.3. Word-class bigrams
- 2.4. Procedure to analyze word-networks
- 3. Experiments
- 3.1. Description of the corpora used in the experiments
- 3.2. Experimental results
- 3.2.1. Initial input interface for in-context and out-of-context analysis
- 3.2.2. Contextual speech recognizer for in-context and out-of-context analysis
- 3.3. Limitations of the technique proposed in this paper
- 4. Conclusions and future work
- Acknowledgements
- References







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