Design and implementation of mandarin spoken dialogue system for flight reservation

doi:10.7523/j.issn.2095-6134.2015.02.015

Abstract

Abstract:

We present a spoken dialogue system for flight reservation, which allows users to inquire information about flight in mandarin. We describe the design and the implementation of our system, focusing on spoken language understanding (SLU). Considering that the speech recognizer inevitably makes errors, we propose a new two-stage mandarin SLU approach based on word confusion network. Firstly, the semantic tuple classifier is used to identify the topic of an input utterance using N-gram features extracted from the word confusion network and to parse a semantic tree by recursively calling semantic classification models. Then the rule-based semantic slot filler is used to extract the corresponding slot/value pairs. The advantage of the proposed approach is that it is mainly data-driven and requires minimally annotated corpus for training. Experiment has been carried out in the Chinese flight reservation domain, which shows that the proposed approach is more robust to speech recognition errors than the conventional handcrafted rule-based parser, and substantially improves performance of accuracy when the ASR word error rate is high.

Key words: spoken dialogue system, spoken language understanding, semantic analysis, word confusion network, dialogue management

CLC Number:

TN912.3

CHEN Zhenfeng, YANG Xiaohao, WU Weilan, LIU Jia, XIA Shanhong. Design and implementation of mandarin spoken dialogue system for flight reservation[J]. , 2015, 32(2): 252-258.

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