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<Paper uid="N03-1005">
  <Title>Automatic Acquisition of Names Using Speak and Spell Mode in Spoken Dialogue Systems</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper describes a novel multi-stage recognition procedure for deducing the spelling and pronunciation of an open set of names. The overall goal is the automatic acquisition of unknown words in a human computer conversational system. The names are spoken and spelled in a single utterance, achieving a concise and natural dialogue flow. The first recognition pass extracts letter hypotheses from the spelled part of the waveform and maps them to phonemic hypotheses via a hierarchical sub-lexical model capable of generating grapheme-phoneme mappings. A second recognition pass determines the name by combining information from the spoken and spelled part of the waveform, augmented with language model constraints. The procedure is integrated into a spoken dialogue system where users are asked to enroll their names for the first time. The acquisition process is implemented in multiple parallel threads for real-time operation. Subsequent to inducing the spelling and pronunciation of a new name, a series of operations automatically updates the recognition and natural language systems to immediately accommodate the new word. Experiments show promising results for letter and phoneme accuracies on a preliminary dataset.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> a8The research at CNRI was supported by DARPA under contract number N66001-00-2-8922, monitored through SPAWAR Systems Center, San Diego. The research at MIT was supported by DARPA under contract number NBCH1020002 monitored through the Dept. of the Interior, National Business</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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