INTERSPEECH 2009 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Brighton, United Kingdom September 6-10, 2009

No Sooner Said Than Done? Testing Incrementality of Semantic Interpretations of Spontaneous Speech

Michaela Atterer, Timo Baumann, David Schlangen

Universität Potsdam, Germany

Ideally, a spoken dialogue system should react without much delay to a user’s utterance. Such a system would already select an object, for instance, before the user has finished her utterance about moving this particular object to a particular place. A prerequisite for such a prompt reaction is that semantic representations are built up on the fly and passed on to other modules. Few approaches to incremental semantics construction exist, and, to our knowledge, none of those has been systematically tested on a spontaneous speech corpus. In this paper, we develop measures to test empirically on transcribed spontaneous speech to what extent we can create semantic interpretation on the fly with an incremental semantic chunker that builds a frame semantics.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Atterer, Michaela / Baumann, Timo / Schlangen, David (2009): "No sooner said than done? testing incrementality of semantic interpretations of spontaneous speech", In INTERSPEECH-2009, 1855-1858.