The BBN/HARC spoken language understanding system

Author

Bates, Madeleine ; Bobrow, Robert ; Fung, Pascale ; Ingria, Robert ; Kubala, Francis ; Makhoul, John ; Nguyen, Long ; Schwartz, Richard ; Stallard, David

Author_Institution

BBN Systems & Technologies, Cambridge, MA, USA

Volume

2

fYear

1993

fDate

27-30 April 1993

Firstpage

111

Abstract

The design and performance of a complete spoken language understanding system under development at BBN are described. The system, dubbed HARC (Hear And Respond to Continuous speech), successfully integrates state-of-the-art speech recognition and natural language understanding subsystems. The system has been tested extensively on a restricted airline travel information (ATIS) domain with a vocabulary of about 2000 words. HARC is implemented in portable, high-level software that runs in real time on today´s workstations to support interactive online human-machine dialogs. No special-purpose hardware is required other than an A/D (analog-to-digital) converter to digitize the speech. The system works well for any native speaker of American English and does not require any enrollment data from the users. Results of formal DARPA tests in Feb. and Nov. 1992 are presented.<>

Keywords

analogue-digital conversion; interactive terminals; natural language interfaces; real-time systems; software portability; speech recognition; American English; airline travel information; design; high-level software; interactive online human-machine dialogs; natural language understanding; performance; real time; speech recognition; spoken language understanding system; tests; vocabulary;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1993. ICASSP-93., 1993 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Minneapolis, MN, USA

ISSN

1520-6149

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7402-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICASSP.1993.319244

Filename

319244