Semantic-oriented error correction for spoken query processing

Voice input is often required in many new application environments such as telephone-based information retrieval, car navigation systems, and user-friendly interfaces, but the low success rate of speech recognition makes it difficult to extend its application to new fields. Popular approaches to increase the accuracy of the recognition rate have been researched by post-processing of the recognition results, but previous approaches were mainly lexical-oriented ones in post error correction. We suggest a new semantic-oriented approach to correct both semantic and lexical errors, which is also more accurate for especially domain-specific speech error correction. Through extensive experiments using a speech-driven in-vehicle telematics information application, we demonstrate the superior performance of our approach and some advantages over previous lexical-oriented approaches.

1. INTRODUCTION

New application environments such as telephone-based retrieval, car navigation systems, and mobile information retrieval, require voice interface to process user queries. In these environrnents, keyboard input is inconvenient or sometimes impossible because of spatial limitations on mobile devices and instability in manipulating the device.