Open Microphone Speech Understanding: Correct Discrimination of in Domain Speech

An ideal spoken dialogue system listens continually and determines which utterances were spoken to it, understands them and responds appropriately while ignoring the rest. This paper outlines a simple method for achieving this goal which involves trading a slightly higher false rejection rate of in domain utterances for a higher correct rejection rate of out of domain (OOD) utterances. The system recognizes semantic entities specified by a unification grammar which is specialized by explanation based learning (EBL), so that it only uses rules which are seen in the training data. The resulting grammar has probabilities assigned to each construct so that overgeneralizations are not a problem. The resulting system only recognizes utterances which reduce to a valid logical form which has meaning for the system and rejects the rest. A class N-gram grammar has been trained on the same training data. This system gives good recognition performance and offers good out of domain discrimination when combined with the semantic analysis. The resulting systems were tested on a space station robot dialogue speech database and a subset of the OGI conversational speech database. Both systems run in real time on a PC laptop and the present performance allows continuous listening with an acceptably low false acceptance rate. This type of open microphone system has been used in the Clarissa procedure reading and navigation spoken dialogue system which is being tested on the International Space Station