A Robust Speech Understanding System Using Conceptual Relational Grammar

We describe a robust speech understanding system based on our newly developed approach to spoken language processing. We show that a robust NLU system can be rapidly developed using a relatively simple speech recognizer to provide sufficient information for database retrieval by spoken language. Our experimental system consists of three components: a speech recognizer based on HMM, a natural language parser based on conceptual relational grammar and a data retrieval system based on the ATIS database. With the use of the robust parsing strategy, database query tasks can be successfully performed.