Can Syntactic Structure Help?
Current language models make no use of the syntactic properties of natural language but rather use very simple statistics such as word co-occurences. Recent results show that incorporating syntactic constraints in a statistical language model reduces the word erroror rate on a conventional dictation task by 10% . We are working on finding the best way of “putting language into language models” as well as exploring the new possibilities opened by such structured language models for other tasks such as speech and language understanding. • Speech Utterance Classification A simple first step to more natural user interfaces in interactive voice response systems is automated call routing. Instead of listening to prompts like “If you are trying to reach department X say Yes, otherwise say No” or punching keys on your telephone keypad, one could simply state in a sentence what the problem is, for example “There is a fraudulous transaction on my last statement” and get connected to the right cu
