Pause as a phrase demarcator for speech and language processing

Abstract

In spontaneous speech understanding a sophisticated integration of speech recognition and language processing is espceially crucial. However, the two modnles are traditionally designed independently, with independent linguistie rules. In Japanese spc.ech recognition the bunsctsu phrase is the basic processing unit and in language processing the sentence is the basic unit. This difference has made it impracticM to use a unique set of linguistic rules for both types of processing. Further, spontaneous speech contains unexpected utterances other than wellformed sentences, while lingnistic rules for both speech and language processing expect well-formed sentences. They therefore fail to process everyday spoken language. To bridge the gap between speech and language processing, we propose that pauses be treated as phrase demarcators and that the interpausal phrase be the basic common processing unit. And to treat the linguistic l)henoI~lena of spoken language properly, we survey relevant features in spontaneous speech data. We then examine the effect of integrating pausal and spontaneous speech phenomena into synt~tctic rules for speech recognition, using 118 sentences. Our experiments show that incorporating pansal phenomena as purely syntactic constraints degrades recognition accuracy considerably, while the additional degradation is minor if some filrther spontaneous speech features are also incorporated.

Segmentation of spoken dialogue by interjections, disfluent utterances and pauses

“…Segmentation of conversational speech by these units would be reasonable across various recognition and analysis approaches, though labeling methodologies for smaller unit should dier according to the research purpose. In fact several previous works on spontaneous speech recognition utilize pauses in spontaneous speech or treat inter-pausal phrases and llers as a unit of processing [2,3,4,5,6].…”