Title
Joint Discriminative Decoding of Words and Semantic Tags for Spoken Language Understanding
Abstract
Most Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) systems today employ a cascade approach, where the best hypothesis from Automatic Speech Recognizer (ASR) is fed into understanding modules such as slot sequence classifiers and intent detectors. The output of these modules is then further fed into downstream components such as interpreter and/or knowledge broker. These statistical models are usually trained individually to optimize the error rate of their respective output. In such approaches, errors from one module irreversibly propagates into other modules causing a serious degradation in the overall performance of the SLU system. Thus it is desirable to jointly optimize all the statistical models together. As a first step towards this, in this paper, we propose a joint decoding framework in which we predict the optimal word as well as slot sequence (semantic tag sequence) jointly given the input acoustic stream. Furthermore, the improved recognition output is then used for an utterance classification task, specifically, we focus on intent detection task. On a SLU task, we show 1.5% absolute reduction (7.6% relative reduction) in word error rate (WER) and 1.2% absolute improvement in F measure for slot prediction when compared to a very strong cascade baseline comprising of state-of-the-art large vocabulary ASR followed by conditional random field (CRF) based slot sequence tagger. Similarly, for intent detection, we show 1.2% absolute reduction (12% relative reduction) in classification error rate.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/TASL.2013.2256894
IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech & Language Processing
Keywords
Field
DocType
speech recognition,speech coding,random processes,natural language processing,decoding,statistical analysis
Speech coding,Computer science,Artificial intelligence,Natural language processing,Discriminative model,Spoken language,Conditional random field,Pattern recognition,Word error rate,Speech recognition,Statistical model,Decoding methods,Vocabulary
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
21
8
1558-7916
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.48
19
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Anoop Deoras124029.36
Gokhan Tur293183.35
Ruhi Sarikaya369864.49
Dilek Z. Hakkani-Tür438743.99