Publication
Robust Processing of Situated Spoken Dialogue
Pierre Lison
In: Christian Chiarcos; Richard Eckart de Castilho; Manfred Stede (Hrsg.). From Form to Meaning: Processing Texts Automatically. Proceedings of the Biennial GSCL Conference 2009. Conference of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology (GSCL-2009), Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Sprachtechnologie und Computerlinguistic, September 30 - October 2, Potsdam, Germany, Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen, 2009.
Abstract
Spoken dialogue is notoriously hard to process with standard language
processing technologies. Dialogue systems must indeed meet two major chal-
lenges. First, natural spoken dialogue is replete with disfluent, partial, elided or
ungrammatical utterances. Second, speech recognition remains a highly error-
prone task, especially for complex, open-ended domains. We present an inte-
grated approach for addressing these two issues, based on a robust incremental
parser. The parser takes word lattices as input and is able to handle ill-formed
and misrecognised utterances by selectively relaxing its set of grammatical rules.
The choice of the most relevant interpretation is then realised via a discrimina-
tive model augmented with contextual information. The approach is fully im-
plemented in a dialogue system for autonomous robots. Evaluation results on a
Wizard of Oz test suite demonstrate very significant improvements in accuracy
and robustness compared to the baseline