Semantic Interpretation With Error Correction

This paper presents a semantic interpretation strategy, for Spoken Dialogue Systems, including an error correction process. Semantic interpretations output by the Spoken Understanding module may be incorrect, but some semantic components may be correct. A set of situations will be introduced, describing semantic confidence based on the agreement of semantic interpretations proposed by different classification methods. The interpretation strategy considers, with the highest priority, the validation of the interpretation arising from the most likely sequence of words. If the probability, given by our confidence score model, that this interpretation is not correct is high, then possible corrections of it are considered using the other sequences in the N-best lists of possible interpretations. This strategy is evaluated on a dialogue corpus provided by France Telecom R&D and collected for a tourism telephone service. Significant reduction in understanding error rate are obtained as well as powerful new confidence measures.