Spoken language applications in natural dialogue settings place serious
requirements on the choice of processing architecture. Especially under adverse
phonetic and acoustic conditions parsing procedures have to be developed which
do not only analyse the incoming speech in a time-synchroneous and incremental
manner, but which are able to schedule their resources according to the varying
conditions of the recognition process. Depending on the actual degree of local
ambiguity the parser has to select among the available constraints in order to
narrow down the search space with as little effort as possible.
A parsing approach based on constraint satisfaction techniques is discussed.
It provides important characteristics of the desired real-time behaviour and
attempts to mimic some of the attention focussing capabilities of the human
speech comprehension mechanism.Comment: 19 pages, LaTe
