COST278 and ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW) on Robustness Issues in Conversational Interaction University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK August 30-31, 2004

Robust Interpretation in the HIGGINS Spoken Dialogue System

Gabriel Skantze, Jens Edlund

Centre of Speech Technology, KTH, Sweden

This paper describes PICKERING, the semantic interpreter developed in the HIGGINS project - a research project on error handling in spoken dialogue systems. In the project, the initial efforts are centred on the input side of the system. The semantic interpreter combines a rich set of robustness techniques with the production of deep semantic structures. It allows insertions and non-agreement inside phrases, and combines partial results to return a limited list of semantically distinct solutions. A preliminary evaluation shows that the interpreter performs well under error conditions, and that the built-in robustness techniques contribute to this performance.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Skantze, Gabriel / Edlund, Jens (2004): "Robust interpretation in the HIGGINS spoken dialogue system", In Robust2004, paper 18.