A vocal data management system

This paper describes an implementation strategy for a vocal data management system (VDMS) being developed by the voice input/output project at the System Development Corporation. VDMS will accept connected speech of a language describable by 25-50 phrase equations and having a vocabulary of approximately 1000 words formed from about 100 data records. The strategy is based on the concept of predictive linguistic constraints (PLC). The present concepts of fixed directionality in parsing are replaced by a more generalized approach. To facilitate this flexibility, the system comprises a set of near-independent coroutines that are interconnected by a software busing structure. The VDMS acoustic processors verify the predictions. Very loose matching criteria are used for locating the predicted words. Special attention is given to word segments that are experimentally determined to be most invariant.