Combining language models in the input interface of a spoken dialogue system

This paper presents a new technique to enhance the performance of the input interface of spoken dialogue systems based on a procedure that combines during speech recognition the advantages of using prompt-dependent language models with those of using a language model independent of the prompts generated by the dialogue system. The technique proposes to create a new speech recognizer, termed contextual speech recognizer, that uses a prompt-independent language model to allow recognizing any kind of sentence permitted in the application domain, and at the same time, uses contextual information (in the form of prompt-dependent language models) to take into account that some sentences are more likely to be uttered than others at a particular moment of the dialogue. The experiments show the technique allows enhancing clearly the performance of the input interface of a previously developed dialogue system based exclusively on prompt-dependent language models. But most important, in comparison with a standard speech recognizer that uses just one prompt-independent language model without contextual information, the proposed recognizer allows increasing the word accuracy and sentence understanding rates by 4.09% and 4.19% absolute, respectively. These scores are slightly better than those obtained using linear interpolation of the prompt-independent and prompt-dependent language models used in the experiments. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.