Abstract / truncated to 115 words (read the full abstract)

This thesis presents a system for the interpretation of natural speech which serves as input module for a spoken dialog system. It carries out the task of extracting application-specific pieces of information from the user utterance in order to pass them to the control module of the dialog system. By following the approach of integrating speech recognition and speech interpretation, the system is able to determine the spoken word sequence together with the hierarchical utterance structure that is necessary for the extraction of information directly from the recorded speech signal. The efficient implementation of the underlying decoder is based on the powerful tool of weighted finite state transducers (WFSTs). This tool allows to compile all ... toggle 14 keywords

speech recognition – natural speech – speech interpretation – speech understanding – spoken dialog – hierarchical language model – statistical language model – semantic interpretation grammar – one-stage decoding – weighted finite-state transducer – WFST – semantic confidences – grammatical alternatives – out-of-vocabulary words

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