Technical Program

Paper Detail

Presentation #2
Session:Spoken Language Understanding
Location:Kallirhoe Hall
Session Time:Wednesday, December 19, 10:00 - 12:00
Presentation Time:Wednesday, December 19, 10:00 - 12:00
Presentation: Poster
Topic: Spoken language understanding:
Paper Title: RANKING APPROACH TO COMPACT TEXT REPRESENTATION FOR PERSONAL DIGITAL ASSISTANTS
Authors: Issac Alphonso, Nick Kibre, Tasos Anastasakos, Microsoft, United States
Abstract: Personal digital assistants must display the output from the speech recognizer in a compact and readable representation. The process of transforming sequences from spoken words to written text is called inverse text normalization (ITN). In this paper, we present a ranking based approach to ITN that incorporates predicative information from various neural-net LSTM and n-gram models to select the best written text to display. Our approach ranks the written text candidates, generated by applying weighted FSTs to the spoken words, using a gradient boosted decision tree ensemble (GBDT). The ranker achieves a 18.48% relative reduction in word error rate over an unweighted FST system. Further, our two-stage approach allows us to decouple speech recognition from ITN and gives us greater flexibility in system configuration, since the written-form can vary by domain.