and the building with eeh brick eeh roof or I let’s see am at it

1. PICKERING Flexible robust interpretation of spoken language Jens Edlund and Gabriel Skantze Introduction PICKERING performs robust interpretation in the HIGGINS spoken dialogue system. HIGGINS is built to handle unconstrained dialogues and aimed at research into different error handling techniques and their combinations. In order to allow us to investigate different techniques, PICKERING is designed with flexibility and rapid grammar development in mind. Developer feedback and testing were also considered. Evaluation 8 subjects were given the task to walk around in a HIGGINS virtual 3D-city and describe their positions relative to objects in their surrounding, at locations of their choice. A grammar was build based on this corpus. 16 new subjects were recorded using the same procedure and the corpus was processed to evaluate the interpreter. Example utterance(s) “Ok now I am standing on körsbärsvägen behind me I’ve got a red house and up ahead to the right there is a red brick house” Robustness against errors Different beam rates were used to induce ASR errors. Effects of parameters • Interpreter features • Grammar independent robustness. Pickering automatically • Allows insertions. • Allows non-agreement. • Finds the best combination of phrases. • Flexible grammar writing. • Extended CFG (or feature grammar) • Lexicon and morphology are optional. • From keyword spotting to full wall-to-wall parsing. • Flexible semantic structures. • From simple key-value structures to nested features structures (trees). • Unification is based on the domain model, which allows for more general rules. • Grammar features may be copied into the semantics. • Incremental interpretation. • The semantic content may determine the end of an utterance. • Robustness challenges • Generation of many similar (correct) solutions. • Use semantics for weeding out solutions. • Generation of sub-optimal solutions. • A chart parser is used to find all possible phrases with insertions allowed everywhere. • The chart is searched for the best combination of phrases that: • 1. Covers as many words as possible. • 2. Uses as few top rules as possible. • 3. Contains as few insertions as possible. • 4. Allows for as little non-agreement as possible. • Efficiency. • Incremental interpretation saves time. and the building with eeh brick eeh roof or I let’s see am at it