Name-aware Speech Recognition for Interactive Question Answering

Citation

S. Stoyanchev, G. Tur, and D. Hakkani-Tür, “Name-aware speech recognition for interactive question answering,” in Proc. 2008 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 5113–5116.

Abstract

In this work we show how interactivity in a voice-enabled question answering application may improve speech recognition. We allow the user to provide a target named entity before asking the question. Then we build a named entity specific language model using the documents containing the named entity. The question-specific model is obtained by merging the named entity specific model with the model built on a set of questions. We present a set of experiments using the TREC question set on the AQUAINT corpus. The question-specific language model is compared with the baseline model built by merging a model of the AQUAINT corpus and past TREC questions. The question-specific model achieves 32.2 pct. reduction in word error rate from the baseline using the questions where pronominal references are resolved.

Index Terms— Spoken question answering, speech recognition, spoken dialog systems


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