Compiling Language Models from a Linguistically Motivated Unification Grammar

Systems now exist which are able to compile unification grammars into language models that can be included in a speech recognizer, but it is so far unclear whether non-trivial linguistically principled grammars can be used for this purpose. We describe a series of experiments which investigate the question empirically, by incrementally constructing a grammar and discovering what problems emerge when successively larger versions are compiled into finite state graph representations and used as language models for a medium-vocabulary recognition task.

A Tool for Collecting Domain Dependent Sortal Constraints From Corpora

In this paper, we describe a tool designed to generate semi-automatically the sortal constraints specific to a domain to be used in a natural language (NL) understanding system. This tool is evaluated using the SRI Gemini NL understanding system in the ATIS domain.