Speech Understanding Systems. Volume I. Introduction and Overview.

Abstract : This five-volume report reviews the BBN speech understanding system. The speech understanding project attempts to develop a continuous speech understanding system which uses syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic support from higher level linguistic knowledge sources to compensate for the inherent acoustic indeterminacies in continuous spoken utterances. These knowledge sources are integrated with sophisticated signal processing and acoustic-phonetic analysis of the input signal, to produce a total system for understanding continuous speech. The system contains components for signal analysis, acoustic parameter extraction, acoustic-phonetic analysis of the signal, phonological expansion of the lexicon, lexical matching and retrieval, syntactic analysis and prediction, semantic analysis and prediction, pragmatic evaluation and prediction, and inferential fact retrieval and question answering, as well as synthesized text or spoken output.