ISIS: Interaction through Speech with Information Systems

Abstract

We present the result of an experimental system aimed at performing a robust semantic analysis of analyzed speech input in the area of information system access.The goal of this experiment was to investigate the effectiveness of such a system in a pipelined architecture,where no control is possible over the morpho- syntactic analysis which precedes the semantic analysis and query formation.The general applicative framework of the ISIS project wastodesignaninformation system NLP interface for automated telephone-based phone-book inquiry.The proposed architecture for the functional prototype contained 3 modules: - a speech recognition system,taking speech signals as input and providing N-best sequences in form of a lattice. - a stochastic syntactic analyzer (i.e.parser)extracting the k best analysis; - a semantic module in charge of filling the frames required to querythe database

ISIS project started on April 1998 and finished on April 1999. It was funded and overseen by SwissCom; the partners were EPFL (LIA and LITH), ISSCO and IDIAP. A technical report is available on-line at: http://lithwww.epfl.ch/~pallotta/rapportfinal.ps.gz