Practical Issues in Compiling Typed Unification Grammars for Speech Recognition

Current alternatives for language modeling are statistical techniques based on large amounts of training data, and hand-crafted context-free or finite-state grammars that are difficult to build and maintain. One way to address the problems of the grammar-based approach is to compile recognition grammars from grammars written in a more expressive formalism. While theoretically straight-forward, the compilation process can exceed memory and time bounds, and might not always result in accurate and efficient speech recognition. We will describe and evaluate two approaches to this compilation problem. We will also describe and evaluate additional techniques to reduce the structural ambiguity of the language model.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: ACL
• Authors: John Dowding, Beth Ann Hockey, Jean Mark Gawron, Christopher Culy
• Keywords: ACL 2001, ACL 2007, Finite-state Grammars, Grammars, Recognition Grammars