Understanding without formality: augmenting speech recognition to understand informal verbal commands.

Verbal command and control systems are fairly common; almost all off-the-shelf speech recognition packages come with a way to perform various tasks through a voice command. Unfortunately, these systems require that the user utter the commands precisely in the format that it is expecting. These systems have a small number of grammar rules defined that are used to match against incoming utterances. Here, we present a method of using these same grammar rules to expand the capabilities of command and control engines to include semantically similar utterances. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is used to connect specific grammar rules with the meanings underlying matching phrases resulting in utterances being matched to grammar rules even though the exact phrase did not match any specific rule. Experiments are described that determine the extent to which this method can be used and how accurate it is.