Continuous Understanding

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Current spoken language understanding systems operate in a layered fashion, where utterances are processed entirely at one level (e.g., speech recognition) before hypotheses are passed to the next level (e.g., parsing). Such a layered organization creates significant problems in developing robust highly-interactive spoken language systems because expectations and feedback that arise from the context of the dialogue are not used by the lower levels of language processing. In collaboration with SRI international, we are developing a new architecture for continuous understanding, in which all levels of processing operate concurrently, sharing information throughout the system, enabling understanding on a word-by-word basis as the utterance progresses. This new architecture should have three main advantages: (1) it should improve the accuracy and efficiency of real-time spoken language understanding; (2) it should better support the processing of spontaneous speech; and (3) it should enable more effective spoken language interfaces that could interact with the user in a free-form, natural manner. The SRI group is focusing on speech recognition and analysis of prosody. This project will have a large impact on the field, and introduce a new paradigm for language understanding systems that could lead to significant leaps in robustness and accuracy, and produce a new generation of highly interactive human-computer interfaces. On a more general scale, as computers become an ever more pervasive part of the fabric of our society, our lives become increasingly more complex. If successful, this project would contribute towards creating much more human-friendly, easy to use, computer interfaces.