Speech recognition in VODIS II

VODIS is a UK Alvey sponsored project to develop Voice Operated Database Inquiry Systems. A key goal of the project is to investigate ways in which higher level knowledge such as syntax and dialog context can be used to improve the performance of existing speech recognition devices. This paper describes VODIS II, a research system in which recognition is based on the conventional one-pass connected word algorithm but extended in two ways. Firstly, syntactic constraints can be applied directly via context free grammar rules. Secondly, the algorithm generates a lattice of candidate word matches rather than a single globally optimal sequence. This lattice is then processed by a chart parser and an intelligent dialogue controller to obtain the most plausible interpretations of the input