Non-expert access to unification based speech understanding

This paper describes the concepts behind a sub grammar design tool being developed within the EU-funded language-engineering project REWARD. The tool is a sub-component of a general platform for designing spoken language systems and addresses dialogue designers who are non-experts in natural language processing and speech technology. Yet, the tool interfaces to a powerful and “professional” unification grammar formalism that is interpreted by a corresponding natural language parser and in a derived finite state approximation form is used for constraining speech recognition. The tool performs some basic intersection and unification operations on feature sets to generate template-like rules complying with the unification grammar formalism.