Robust Interpretation of User Requests for Text Retrieval in a Multimodal Environment

We describe a parser for robust and flexible interpretation of user utterances in a multi-modal system for web search in newspaper databases. Users can speak or type, and they can navigate and follow links using mouse click. Language queries may combine search expressions with browser commands and search space restrictions. In interpreting input queries, the system has to be fault-tolerant to account for spontanous speech phenomena as well as typing or speech recognition errors which often distort the meaning of the utterance and are difficult to detect and correct. We present a parser integrating shallow parsing techniques with knowledgebased text retrieval to allow for robust processing and coordination of input modes. Parsing consists of two layers: typical meta-expressions like those for search, newspaper types and dates are identified and excluded from the search string to be sent to the search engine. The search terms which are left after preprocessing are then grouped according...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: COLING
• Authors: Alexandra Klein, Estela Puig-Waldmüller, Harald Trost
• Keywords: COLING 2002, COLING 2008, Search Expressions, Spontanous Speech Phenomena, Web Search