Detection and correction of speech repairs in word lattices

Speech repairs occur often in spontaneous spoken dialogues. The ability to detect and correct those repairs is necessary for every spoken language system. We present a framework to detect and correct speech repairs where all relevant levels of information, i.e., acoustics, lexic, syntax and semantics could be integrated. The basic idea is to reduce the search space for repairs as soon as possible by cascading filters that involve more and more features. At first an acoustic module generates hypotheses about the existence of a repair. Second a stochastic model suggests a correction for every hypothesis. Well scored corrections are inserted as new paths in the word lattice. A lattice parser then makes the final decision about accepting the repair.