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Combining Syntax and Pragmatic Knowledge for the Understanding of Spontaneous Spoken Sentences

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2099))

Abstract

In Human-Computer dialogue, spoken language understanding systems use mainly selective methods and are limited to very specific domains. On the contrary we present in this paper a speech understanding system which achieves a more detailed analysis of spoken recognized utterances.

The semantic representation of a sentence is a logic formula. Semantic and pragmatic considerations shape the formula. The analysis itself is split into two phases based on different principles. The first phase is almost exclusively syntactic. It corresponds to a segmentation into chunks whose meaning is obtained by composing λ-terms to build elementary formulas. In the second phase, the chunks are interpreted and then composed, mainly through coordination. These compositions are mainly based on pragmatic contraints provided most of the time by the context of the application.

We give here an account of the results obtained from a first series of tests. We also discuss the use of the same ideas for applications in well defined semantic domains such as database processing.

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Villaneau, J., Antoine, JY., Ridoux, O. (2001). Combining Syntax and Pragmatic Knowledge for the Understanding of Spontaneous Spoken Sentences. In: de Groote, P., Morrill, G., Retoré, C. (eds) Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics. LACL 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2099. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48199-0_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48199-0_17

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42273-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48199-7

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