An integrated approach to robust processing of situated spoken dialogue

Abstract

Spoken dialogue is notoriously hard to process with standard NLP technologies. Natural spoken dialogue is replete with disfluent, partial, elided or ungrammatical utterances, all of which are very hard to accommodate in a dialogue system. Furthermore, speech recognition is known to be a highly error-prone task, especially for complex, open-ended discourse domains. The combination of these two problems -- ill-formed and/or misrecognised speech inputs -- raises a major challenge to the development of robust dialogue systems.