This paper reports on some experiments on time synchronous interfaces between word recognition and parsing, performed with a beam decoder and a chart parser. Using the same acoustic models, language model, and unification grammar, bottom-up and two interactive protocols were implemented and examined. Results show that close integration is possible without unbearable time penalties, if restrictions from both modules are applied to focus the search process.

This paper reports on some experiments on time synchronous interfaces between word recognition and parsing, performed with a beam decoder and a chart parser. Using the same acoustic models, language model, and unification grammar, bottom-up and two interactive protocols were implemented and examined. Results show that close integration is possible without unbearable time penalties, if restrictions from both modules are applied to focus the search process. 1 Introduction Integration of speech and language technology has been of growing interest for a couple of years. A variety of interfaces has been introduced between acoustic and linguistic processing. In this article, we concentrate on some as we think prototypical variations of the time synchronous strategies. There are several reasons why these strategies are of special interest: ffl Humans seem to do acoustic--linguistic processing in a tightly coupled manner. ffl A partial syntactic analysis of the word sequence exists while it...