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<Paper uid="H92-1060">
  <Title>A Relaxation Method for Understanding Speech Utterances 1</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="299" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Current approaches to the language understanding aspect of spoken language systems tend to fall into two categories. In syntax-driven formulations \[1,4,10\], a complete syntactic analysis is performed which attempts to account for all words in an utterance. While providing strong linguistic constraints to the speech recognition component and a useful structure for further linguistic analysis, such an approach can break down in the presence of unknown words, novel linguistic constructs, recognition errors, and some spontaneous speech events such as false starts. In contrast, semantic-driven approaches \[2,5,9\] tend to derive their understanding by spotting key words and phrases in the utterance. While this approach can potentially provide better coverage and deal with ill-formed sentences, it provides less constraint for the speech recognizer, and may not be able to adequately interpret complex linguistic constructs.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This paper describes our efforts to develop a language understanding component that combines the advantages of both of these approaches. Our strategy has been to  relax the constraint that the syntactic analysis must account for all of the words in an utterance. Our current implementation is a two stage process. In the first step, our parser \[7\] searches for a complete linguistic analysis. Failing that, constraints of the parser are relaxed to permit the recovery of parsable phrases and clauses within the sentence. These fragments are fused together using a mechanism that closely resembles our discourse history mechanism \[8\]. Thus the robust parser is able to leverage off of existing components to a large degree.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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