Experiments In Speech Understanding System Control

Abstract

A series of experiments was performed concerning control strategies for a speech understanding system. The main experiment tested the effects on performance of four major choices: focus attention by inhibition or use an unbiased best-first method, “island-drive’’ or process left or right, use context checks in priority setting or do not, and map words all at once or map only as called for. Each combination of choices was tested with 60 simulated utterances of lengths varying from 0.8 to 2.3 seconds. The results include analysis of the effects and interactions of the design choices with respect to aspects of system performance such as overall sentence accuracy, processing time, and storage. Other experiments include tests of acoustic processing performance and a study of the effects of increased vocabulary and improved acoustic accuracy.