Speech Understanding Systems

Abstract
This report describes recent progress of the BBN Speech Understanding Systems project covering the period from February 1976 to April 1976. The BBN Speech Understanding project is an effort 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 interminacies 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, semantic, and pragmatic analysis and prediction; and inferential fact retrieval and question answering, as well as synthesized text or spoken output. This sixth quarterly technical progress report contains technical notes on probabilistic lexical retrieval, on a new recognition strategy based on 'shortfall density,' and on the evolving uses of knowledge in the system.

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