In this paper we give an outline of a corpus planning project which aims to develop linguistic resources for the nine official African languages of South Africa in the form of corpora, more specifically spoken language corpora. In the course of the article, we will address issues such as spoken language vs. written language, register vs. activity and normative vs. non-normative approaches to co...

Spoken language systems are highly complex and teaching of students in this subject matter and in the underlying technologies could benefit greatly from instructional software. The aim of this work has been to give students hands-on experience via a fully functioning spoken dialogue system as a teaching aid. This dialogue system was built using our toolkit for spoken language technology as a de...

We argue that finite clauses should be regarded as the basic unit in syntactic analysis of spoken language, and describe a method that automatically detects clause boundaries by classifying coordinating conjunctions in spoken language discourse as belonging to either the syntactic level or the discourse level of analysis. The method exploits the special role that coordinating conjunctions play ...

In this paper, we propose an example-based decoder for a statistical machine translation (SMT) system, which is used for spoken language machine translation. In this way, it will help to solve the re-ordering problem and other problems for spoken language MT, such as lots of omissions, idioms etc. Through experiments, we show that this approach obtains improvements over the baseline on a Chines...

Spoken language dialogue systems represent the peak of achievement in speech technologies in the 20 th century and appear set to form the basis for the increasingly natural interactive systems to follow in the coming decades. This chapter first presents a model of the task-oriented spoken dialogue system, its multiple aspects and some of the remaining research challenges. In the context of this...

" Spoken language " is a field of natural language processing, which deals with transcribed speech utterances. The processing of spoken language is much more complex and complicated than processing standard, grammatically correct natural language , and requires special treatment of typical speech phenomena called " disfluencies " , like corrections , interjections and repetitions of words or ph...

This paper will briefly introduce MSDSKIT-1 (Multilingual Spoken Dialogue System Version 1.0 developed by Kyoto Institute of Technology) which integrates Japanese and Chinese now. It is a promotion vision of the SDSKIT-3 (Spoken Dialogue System in Japanese). This system can provide services such as sight-seeing introduction, traffic guidance, hotel reservation. A user can also plan his itinerar...

The rule-based parsing is a prevalent method for the natural language understanding (NLU) and has been introduced in dialogue systems for spoken language processing (SLP). However, additional measures must be taken to cope with the severe spoken linguistic phenomena, such as garbage, repetition, ellipsis, word disordering, fragment and ill form, which frequently occur in the spoken language. We...