Handling compound nouns in a Swedish speech-understanding system

Abstract

This paper describes and evaluates a simple and general solution to the handling of compound nouns in Swedish and other languages in which compounds can be formed by concatenation of single words. The basic idea is to split compounds into their components and treat these components as recognition units that are equivalent to other words in the language model. By using a principled grammar-based language-processing architecture, it is then possible to accommodate input in a split-compound format.