Integrated speech and morphological processing in a connectionist continuous speech understanding for Korean

A new tightly coupled speech and natural language integration model is presented for a TDNN-based continuous possibly large vocabulary speech recognition system for Korean. Unlike popular n-best techniques developed for integrating mainly HMM-based speech recognition and natural language processing in a {\em word level}, which is obviously inadequate for morphologically complex agglutinative languages, our model constructs a spoken language system based on a {\em morpheme-level} speech and language integration. With this integration scheme, the spoken Korean processing engine (SKOPE) is designed and implemented using a TDNN-based diphone recognition module integrated with a Viterbi-based lexical decoding and symbolic phonological/morphological co-analysis. Our experiment results show that the speaker-dependent continuous {\em eojeol} (Korean word) recognition and integrated morphological analysis can be achieved with over 80.6% success rate directly from speech inputs for the middle-level vocabularies.Comment: latex source with a4 style, 15 pages, to be published in computer processing of oriental language journa

Pauses and the temporal structure of speech

Natural-sounding speech synthesis requires close control over the temporal structure of the speech flow. This includes a full predictive scheme for the durational structure and in particuliar the prolongation of final syllables of lexemes as well as for the pausal structure in the utterance. In this chapter, a description of the temporal structure and the summary of the numerous factors that modify it are presented. In the second part, predictive schemes for the temporal structure of speech ("performance structures") are introduced, and their potential for characterising the overall prosodic structure of speech is demonstrated

Connectionist natural language parsing

The key developments of two decades of connectionist parsing are reviewed. Connectionist parsers are assessed according to their ability to learn to represent syntactic structures from examples automatically, without being presented with symbolic grammar rules. This review also considers the extent to which connectionist parsers offer computational models of human sentence processing and provide plausible accounts of psycholinguistic data. In considering these issues, special attention is paid to the level of realism, the nature of the modularity, and the type of processing that is to be found in a wide range of parsers

Centering, Anaphora Resolution, and Discourse Structure

Centering was formulated as a model of the relationship between attentional state, the form of referring expressions, and the coherence of an utterance within a discourse segment (Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein, 1986; Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein, 1995). In this chapter, I argue that the restriction of centering to operating within a discourse segment should be abandoned in order to integrate centering with a model of global discourse structure. The within-segment restriction causes three problems. The first problem is that centers are often continued over discourse segment boundaries with pronominal referring expressions whose form is identical to those that occur within a discourse segment. The second problem is that recent work has shown that listeners perceive segment boundaries at various levels of granularity. If centering models a universal processing phenomenon, it is implausible that each listener is using a different centering algorithm.The third issue is that even for utterances within a discourse segment, there are strong contrasts between utterances whose adjacent utterance within a segment is hierarchically recent and those whose adjacent utterance within a segment is linearly recent. This chapter argues that these problems can be eliminated by replacing Grosz and Sidner's stack model of attentional state with an alternate model, the cache model. I show how the cache model is easily integrated with the centering algorithm, and provide several types of data from naturally occurring discourses that support the proposed integrated model. Future work should provide additional support for these claims with an examination of a larger corpus of naturally occurring discourses.Comment: 35 pages, uses elsart12, lingmacros, named, psfi