A flexible control strategy with multilevel judgements for a knowledge based speech understanding system

A flexible control strategy for a speech understanding and dialog system is presented. The system is organized around a homogeneous knowledge base. The used knowledge representation language is based on semantic networks. It does not only cover declarative but also procedural knowledge. The inference processes can be described by five problem-independent rules which form the procedural semantics of the network language. The control strategy itself is the well-known A*-algorithm, but for scoring purposes complex judgement vectors are used. It is shown that these vectors are admissible for the control algorithm and that they reflect the quality, the certainty, and the priority of both bottom-up and top-down hypotheses. So far, the system has been tested in a rough prototype version, and an efficient realization is being built