A knowledge graph based speech interface for question answering systems

Speech interfaces to conversational systems have been a focus in academia and industry for over a decade due to its applicability as a natural interface. Speech recognition and speech synthesis constitute the important input and output modules respectively for such spoken interface systems. In this paper, the speech recognition interface for question answering applications is reviewed, and existing limitations are discussed. The existing spoken question answering (QA) systems use an automatic speech recogniser by adapting acoustic and language models for the speech interface and off-the-shelf language processing systems for question interpretation. In the process, the impact of recognition errors and language processing inaccuracies is neglected. It is illustrated in the paper how a semantically rich knowledge graph can be used to solve automatic speech recognition and language processing specific problems. A simple concatenation of a speech recogniser and a natural language processing system is a shallow method for a speech interface. An effort beyond merely concatenating these two units is required to develop a successful spoken question answering system. It is illustrated in this paper how a knowledge graph based structured data can be used to build a unified system combining speech recognition and language understanding. This facilitates the use of a semantically rich data model for speech interface. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.