Conceptual language model design for spoken language understanding

Catherine Kobus, Géraldine Damnati, Lionel Delphin-Poulat, Renato de Mori

Abstract: This paper describes the construction and use of language models specific to semantic concepts. A tolerance mechanism is introduced in order to design conceptual constituents that cover longer word patterns while remaining robust to spontaneous speech disfluencies and recognition errors. These models are obtained from sentence patterns which grow from essential information to longer sequences of words. It is shown that these augmented conceptual constituents provide reductions in concept error rates on a spoken dialog application task.