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<Paper uid="H89-1018">
  <Title>UNDERSTANDING SPONTANEOUS SPEECH</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="137" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> As systems become more habitable and allow users to speak naturally, speech recognizers and parsers are going to have to deal with events not present in written text or read speech. Spontaneous speech contains a number of phenomena that cause problems for current systems.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  constituents in unusual orders (&amp;quot;to the utilities cell add fifty dollars&amp;quot;). These phenomena violate constraints currently used by speech recognizers to increase performance. This can cause complete recognition failure for an utterance.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In his paper on habitability, Watt (1968) characterizes the problem as a difference between COMPETENCE and PERFORMANCE. We must recognize what people say, not what they think is grammatical. In real dialogs, much can be understood from context and is left out of utterances. Ellipsis is very common. Many elliptical utterances are not just deletions from expected well-formed sentences. Consider the utterances &amp;quot;okay .. expenses .. mortgage seven forty eight point fifty seven .. car payment, two forty three, point twenty seven, bank surcharge, fifteen dollars&amp;quot;. The focus is the information to be transferred, a label specification and an amount. Each utterance is the simplest expression of the neccessary information with no other embroidery.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The solution to this problem must involve both parsing and recognition strategies. It must resolve the competeing aims of reducing search space and remaining flexible to the unexpected. Our approach is a combination of specific modelling of acoustic properties and a flexible control structure.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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