Putting Linguistics into Speech Recognition: The Regulus Grammar Compiler Manny Rayner, Beth Ann Hockey, and Pierette Bouillon (NASA Ames Research Center and University of Geneva) Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications (CSLI studies in computational linguistics, edited by Ann Copestake), 2006, xiv+305 pp; hardbound, ISBN 1-57586-525-4, $65.00; paperbound, ISBN 1-57586-526-2, $25.00
Year: 2007
Type: book-review
Abstract: This book provides a detailed overview of Regulus, an open-source toolkit for building and compiling grammars for spoken dialog systems, which has been used for a number of applications including Clarissa, a spoken language system in use on the International Space Station.The focus is on controlled-language user-initiative systems, in which the user drives the dialog, but is required to use constrained language.Such a spoken language interface allows for a constrained range of commands-for example, "open the pod-bay doors"-to be issued in circumstances where, ergonomically, other interface options are infeasible.The emphasis of the approach, given the kind of application that is the focus of the work, is thus less on robustness of speech recognition and more on depth of semantic processing and quality of the dialog management.It is an interesting book, one which succeeds in motivating key problems and presenting general approaches to solving them, with enough in the way of explicit details to allow even a complete novice in spoken language processing to implement simple dialog systems.The book is split into two parts.The first half is a very detailed tutorial on using Regulus to build and compile grammars.Regulus, although itself open-source, makes use of SICStus Prolog for the dialog processing and the Nuance Toolkit for speech recognition.Grammars in Regulus are specified with features requiring unification, but are compiled into context-free grammars for use with the Nuance speech recognition system.An abundance of implementation details and guidance for the reader (or grammar writer) is provided in this part of the book for building grammars as well as a dialog manager.The presentation includes example implementations handling such phenomena as ellipsis and corrections.In addition, details for building spoken language translation systems are presented within the same range of constrained language applications.The tutorial format is terrifically explicit, which will make this volume appropriate for undergraduate courses looking to provide students with hands-on exercises in building spoken dialog systems.One issue with the premise of an open-source toolkit that relies upon other software (SICStus Prolog, Nuance) for key parts of the application is that one is required to obtain and use that software.In the book, the authors note that an individual license of SICStus is available for a relatively small fee, and that Nuance has a program to license their Toolkit for research purposes.Unfortunately, since the writing of the book, corporate changes at Nuance have made obtaining such a research license more challenging, and this reviewer was only able to do so after several weeks of e-mail persistence.It would be very beneficial to future readers if the authors would scout out the current state of
Source: Computational Linguistics
Author: Brian Roark
Institution: Oregon Health & Science University
Language: English
Topic: Speech and dialogue systems
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2017107580