Integration of speech recognition and natural language processing in the MIT VOYAGER system

The MIT VOYAGER speech understanding system is an urban exploration and navigation system that interacts with the user through spoken dialogue, text, and graphics. The authors describe recent attempts at improving the integration between the speech recognition and natural language components. They used the generation capability of the natural language component to produce a word-pair language model to constrain the recognizer´s search space, thus improving the coverage of the overall system. They also implemented a strategy in which the recognizer generates the top N word strings and passes them along to the natural language component for filtering. Results on performance evaluation are presented