SPIN: language understanding for spoken dialogue systems using a production system approach

Abstract

This paper describes a language understanding module for spoken dialogue systems producing frame based semantic output. The presented approach adapts ideas from production systems to the task of language understanding. It interleaves in a new manner template-driven cascaded word-to-frame transformation with syntactic analysis. The advantages over conventional parsers are the flexible output structure being independent of the syntactic structure in a wide range, the ability to use different levels of syntactic analysis at the same time and better support for relatively free word order languages like German. Other important properties are robustness, the capability to process complex utterances, and the easy creation of knowledge bases. A preliminary evaluation shows promising results.