Minimizing Cumulative Error in Discourse Context

. Cumulative error limits the usefulness of context in applications utilizing contextual information. It is especially a problem in spontaneous speech systems where unexpected input, out-of-domain utterances and missing information are hard to fit into the standard structure of the contextual model. In this paper we discuss how our approaches to recognizing speech acts address the problem of cumulative error. We demonstrate the advantage of the proposed approaches over those that do not address the problem of cumulative error. The experiments are conducted in the context of Enthusiast, a large Spanish-to-English speech-to-speech translation system in the appointment scheduling domain [13, 12, 11, 5]. 1 The Cumulative Error Problem To interpret natural language, it is necessary to take context into account. However, taking context into account can also generate new problems, such as those arising because of cumulative error. Cumulative error is introduced when an incorrect hypothesis i..