Natural Language Dialogue group

Reasoning about sound similarities improves the performance of a Natural Language Understanding component that interprets speech recognizer output: the authors observed a 5% to 7% reduction in errors when they augmented the word strings with a phonetic representation, derived from the words by means of a dictionary. The best performance comes from mixture models incorporating both word and phone features. Since the phonetic representation is derived from a dictionary, the method can be applied easily without the need for integration with a specific speech recognizer. The method has similarities with autonomous (or bottom-up) psychological models of lexical access, where contextual information is not integrated at the stage of auditory perception but rather later.