No sooner said than done? testing incrementality of semantic interpretations of spontaneous speech

Ideally, a spoken dialogue system should react without much delay to a user’s utterance. Such a system would already select an object, for instance, before the user has finished her utterance about moving this particular object to a particular place. A prerequisite for such a prompt reaction is that semantic representations are built up on the fly and passed on to other modules. Few approaches to incremental semantics construction exist, and, to our knowledge, none of those has been systematically tested on a spontaneous speech corpus. In this paper, we develop measures to test empirically on transcribed spontaneous speech to what extent we can create semantic interpretation on the fly with an incremental semantic chunker that builds a frame semantics.