Integrated Techniques for Phrase Extraction from Speech

We present an integrated approach to speech and natural language processing which uses a single parser to create training for a statistical speech recognition component and for interpreting recognized text. On the speech recognition side, our innovation is the use of a statistical model combining N-gram and context-free grammars. On the natural language side, our innovation is the integration of parsing and semantic interpretation to build references for only targeted phrase types. In both components, a semantic grammar and partial parsing facilitate robust processing of the targeted portions of a domain. This integrated approach introduces as much linguistic structure and prior statistical information as is available while maintaining a robust full-coverage statistical language model for recognition. In addition, our approach facilitates both the direct detection of linguistic constituents within the speech recognition algorithms and the creation of semantic interpretations of the recognized phrases.