Spoken Dialogue Understanding and Local Context.
Abstract
Spoken dialogue poses many new problems to researchers in the field of computational linguistics. In particular, conversants must detect and correct speech repairs, segment a turn into individual utterances, and identify discourse markers. These problems are interrelated. For instance, there are some lexical items whose role in an utterance can be ambiguous: they can act as discourse markers, signal a speech repair, or even be part of the content of an utterance unit. So, these issues must be addressed together. The resolution of these problems will allow a basic understanding of how a speaker's turn can be broken down into individual contributions to the dialogue. We propose that this resolution must be and can be done using local context. They do not require a full understanding of the dialogue so far, nor, in most cases, a deep understanding of the current turn. Resolving these issues locally also means they can be resolved for the most part before later processing, and so will make a natural language understanding system more robust and able to deal with the unconstrained nature of spoken dialogue. (AN)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 01, 1994
- Accession Number
- ADA289862
Entities
People
- Peter A. Heeman
Organizations
- University of Rochester