Parsing Spoken Language: a Semantic Caseframe Approach

Parsing spoken input introduces serious problems not present in parsing typed natural language. In particular, indeterminacies and inaccuracies of acoustic recognition must be handled in an integral manner. Many techniques for parsing typed natural language do not adapt well to these extra demands. This paper describes an extension of semantic caseframe parsing to restricted-domain spoken input. The semantic caseframe grammar representation is the same as that used for earlier work on robust parsing of typed input. Due to the uncertainty inherent in speech recognition, the caseframe grammar is applied in a quite different way, emphasizing island growing from caseframe headers. This radical change in application is possible due to the high degree of abstraction in the caseframe representation. The approach presented was tested successfully in a preliminary implementation.