A specialist society for continuous speech understanding

The authors propose a homogeneous architecture for organizing and controlling multiple knowledge sources in signal interpretation systems based on the decomposition of the interpretation problem into subproblems at successive conceptual levels. Partial interpretations and knowledge about the problem are partitioned into associations each of which consisting of several specialists. Information exchange is assured by a common data structure within knowledge sources at each given level and by a message passing mechanism between two different levels. Different strategies adapted to the nature of the problem may be implemented at each level. The interpretation process consists in executing the groups of knowledge sources in multiple phases controlled by data and models in each concept domain and allowing incremental construction of solutions. The authors illustrate the architecture by an application to continuous spoken Chinese understanding