Detection of Conditionals in Spoken Utterances
Authors: Weigelt, Sebastian, Hey, Tobias and Steurer, Vanessa
Conference: IEEE 12th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), 2018
Abstract: State-of-the-art intelligent assistant systems such as Siri & Co. struggle with conditionals. They reliably react to ordinary commands. However, their architectures are not designed to cope with complex conditional queries. We propose a system to overcome these limitations. Our approach models if-then-else constructs in spoken utterances explicitly. The model bridges the gap between linguistic and programmatic semantics. To proof our concept, we apply a rule-based approach to extract conditionals. For our prototype we use part-of-speech and chunk tags provided by NLP tools. We make use of coreference information to determine the reference frame of a condition. The explicit modeling of conditionals allows us to evaluate the accuracy of our approach independently from other language understanding tasks. The prototype works well in the domain of humanoid robotics. In a user study we achieve F1 scores of 0.783 (automatic speech recognition) up to 0.898 (manual transcripts) on unrestricted utterances.
@INPROCEEDINGS{8334444,
author={S. Weigelt and T. Hey and V. Steurer},
booktitle={2018 IEEE 12th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC)},
title={Detection of Conditionals in Spoken Utterances},
year={2018},
volume={},
number={},
pages={85-92},
keywords={knowledge based systems;natural language interfaces;natural language processing;speech recognition;F1 scores;NLP tools;Siri;automatic speech recognition;chunk tags;complex conditional queries;conditionals detection;conditionals extraction;coreference information;explicit modeling;humanoid robotics;intelligent assistant systems;language understanding tasks;linguistic semantics;manual transcripts;ordinary commands;part-of-speech;programmatic semantics;rule-based approach;spoken utterances;unrestricted utterances;Linguistics;Ontologies;Robots;Semantics;Task analysis;Tools;Condition Model;Conditional Semantics;Conditionals;End User Programming;Knowledge Representation;Language Model;Natural Language Processing;Natural Language Understanding;Programming In Natural Language;Semantic Parsing;Spoken Language Interfaces;Spoken Language Understanding},
doi={10.1109/ICSC.2018.00021},
ISSN={},
month={Jan}
}