Speech Understanding in Open Tasks

Wayne Ward, Sunil lssar, Xuedong Huang, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Mei-Yuh Hwang, Sheryl Young, Michael Matessa, Fu-Hua Liu, Richard Stern

Abstract: The Air Traffic Information Service task is currently used by DARPA as a common evaluation task for Spoken Language Systems. This task is an example of open type tasks. Subjects are given a task and allowed to interact spontaneously with the system by voice. There is no fixed lexicon or grammar, and subjects are likely to exceed those used by any given system. In order to evaluate system performance on such tasks, a common corpus of training data has been gathered and annotated. An independent test corpus was also created in a similar fashion. This paper explains the techniques used in our system and the performance results on the standard set of tests used to evaluate systems.