RUBISC - a Robust Unification-Based Incremental Semantic Chunker

We present RUBISC, a new incremental chunker that can perform incremental slot filling and revising as it receives a stream of words. Slot values can influence each other via a unification mechanism. Chunks correspond to sense units, and end-of-sentence detection is done incrementally based on a notion of semantic/pragmatic completeness. One of RUBISC's main fields of application is in dialogue systems where it can contribute to responsiveness and hence naturalness, because it can provide a partial or complete semantics of an utterance while the speaker is still speaking. The chunker is evaluated on a German transcribed speech corpus and achieves a concept error rate of 43.3% and an F-Score of 81.5.

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