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<Paper uid="H89-2073">
  <Title>Integration of Speech and Natural Language Understanding for Spoken Language Systems (SLS)</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="457" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> * Demonstrated the feasibility of a unique frame-level integration of speech and natural language which permits independent development and, computationally efficient, integrated application of constraints from phonetics through semantics, * Developed a phonological rule set with high coverage and low overcoverage that when combined with algorithms developed under the Real Time Speech Recognition contract improved performance for both speaker-independent and speaker-dependent recognition, * Incorporated techniques (developed under an NSF grant) that use statistical information about the speech signal and the noise to improve recognition accuracy in noisy environments, * Shown the feasibility of integrating prosodic information (e.g., duration models developed under a DARPA-NSF contract) in the grammar-parser, * Collected, transcribed, and analyzed over 8 hours of human-human air travel dialogues for use in vocabulary estimates and initial system design, * Acquired the Official Airline Guide Database; implemented it in a relational non-proprietary form delivered to TI; created an initial SLS simulation; used it to collect 88 air travel planning dialogues which have been transcribed, analyzed and used to design: (a) data collection methods for evaluation of an SLS kernel, and (b) a more complex multi-modal interactive interface in the air travel planning domain.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> PLANS * Port the syntax from the resource management domain to the air travel planning domain; incorporate domain-specific semantics for the air travel planning domain, * Begin integration of phonology, syntax, semantics, and prosody for accurate modeling of spontaneous speech; statistical modeling of linguistic relationships that can control perplexity and maintain habitability, * Continue coordination with related contracts where appropriate, * Collect and analyze more human-machine data under various conditions in order to guide the design and  evaluation of the SRI SLS.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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