" 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...

Over-the-telephone Large Vocabulary Spoken Dialog Systems have now become a commercial reality. A major obstacle to the uptake of the technology is the effort required to construct spoken dialog applications, in particular the grammars. To overcome this obstacle, a spoken dialogue toolkit has been developed that uses grammatical inference in combination with a templating technique to build tran...

Linguistic research has identified abstract properties that seem to be shared by all languages-such properties may be considered defining characteristics. In recent decades, the recognition that human language is found not only in the spoken modality but also in the form of sign languages has led to a reconsideration of some of these potential linguistic universals. In large part, the linguisti...

It is often difficult to build a robust Statistical Language Model (SLM) for a domain-specific spoken dialogue system because it’s very challenging to collect enough data for a specific domain. One solution is to build an SLM based on domainspecific grammar rules which do not need to collect a lot of data. A number of studies have found that this solution is effective and encouraging. However, ...

Much of contemporary mainstream formal grammar theory is unable to provide analyses for language as it occurs in actual spoken interaction. Its analyses are developed for a cleaned up version of language which omits the disfluencies, non-sentential utterances, gestures, and many other phenomena that are ubiquitous in spoken language. Using evidence from linguistics, conversation analysis, multi...

Many state-of-the-art conversational systems use semantic-based robust understanding and manually derived grammars, a very time-consuming and error-prone process. This paper describes a machine-aided grammar authoring system that enables a programmer to rapidly develop a high quality grammar for conversational systems. This is achieved with a combination of domain-specific semantics, a library ...

So-called ill-formed utterances abound in natural discourse. This paper describes how listeners can understand such utterances in a discourse, including speech hesitations and slips-of-the-tongue. Through analysis of durations of utterances and their succeeding pauses, and of intonation patterns, and also through listener understanding experiments using ill-formed utterances, the following resu...