Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to James, Frankie.
This report examines a series of tests that were performed on variations of the modified Kneser Ney smoothing model outlined in a study by Chen and Goodman. We explore several different ways of choosing and setting the discounting parameters, as well as the exclusion of singleton contexts at various levels of the model.
We describe a technique which makes it feasible to improve the performance of a language model derived from a manually constructed unification grammar, using low-quality untranscribed speech data and a minimum of human annotation. The method is on a medium-vocabulary spoken language command and control task.
We present a new technique for evaluating spoken dialogue interfaces that allows us to separate the dialogue behavior from the rest of the speech system. By using a dialogue simulator that we have developed, we can gather usability data on the system s dialogue interaction and behaviors that can guide improvements to the speech interface. Preliminary testing has shown promising results, suggesting that it is possible to test properties of dialogue separately from other factors such as recognition quality.