Spoken language systems (SLSs) for accessing information sources or services through the telephone network and the Internet are currently being trialed and deployed for a variety of tasks. Evaluating the usability of different interface designs requires a method for comparing performance

Abstract. This paper explores an existing spoken language system evaluation method and presents an alternative method, called the “Speech Usability Metric”. The limitations of the pre-existing method are explored and a much simpler approach to the evaluation of spoken language systems is presented

We describe HARC, a system for speech understanding that integrates speech recognition techniques with natural language processing. The integrated system uses statistical pattern recognition to build a lattice of potential words in the input speech. This word lattice is passed to a unification

created in 2001, bringing together the expertise of several research groups that shared a common goal: to bridge the gap between natural spoken language and the underlying semantic information, focusing on European Portuguese. This paper describes our efforts towards this long-term goal, starting

We present a conditional-random-field ap-proach to discriminatively-trained phrase-based machine translation in which training and decoding are both cast in a sampling framework and are implemented uniformly in a new probabilistic programming language for factor graphs. In traditional phrase

Abstract. We present a syntax/semantics interface that was developed having in mind a set of problems identified in system Edite, which wasbased on a traditional syntax/semantics interface. In our syntax/semantics interface, syntactic and semantic rules are independent, semantic rules

We propose an unsupervised approach to POS tagging where first we associate each word type with a probability distribution over word classes using Latent Dirichlet Alloca-tion. Then we create a hierarchical cluster-ing of the word types: we use an agglomer-ative clustering algorithm where the distance between clusters is defined as the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the probability distributions over classes associated with each word-type. When assigning POS tags, we find the tree leaf most similar to the current word and use the prefix of the path leading to this leaf as the tag. This simple labeler outper-forms a baseline based on Brown clusters on 9 out of 10 datasets. 1

in several local schools. 1. INTRODUCTION Research and development of spoken language systems is currently limited to relatively few academic and industrial laboratories. Because building such systems requires multidisciplinary expertise, sophisticated system development tools, language resources (e

to Categorial Grammar. According to this theory, the syntactic structures and the intonation structures of English are identical, and have the same grammar. Some simplifications appear to follow for the problem of integrating syntax and other high-level modules in spoken language systems. Phrasal intonation

corpus of data with which to test research hypotheses. We describe the Air Travel Information System (ATIS) pilot corpus, a corpus designed to measure progress in Spoken Language Systems that include both a speech and natural language component. This pilot marks the first full-scale attempt to collect