Robust and efficient semantic parsing of free word order languages in spoken dialogue systems

This paper presents a semantic parser for spoken dialogue systems. The parser is designed especially for the analysis of free word order languages by providing a feature called orderindependent matching. We describe how this feature allows writing of rules for free word order languages in an elegant way (using German as example language) and how it increases the robustness against speech recognition errors. As orderindependent matching makes efficient parsing more difficult, we present a new parsing approach which provides efficient processing for rule bases that are, according to our experience, typical for spoken dialogue systems. The key feature of the parsing approach is a fixed application order of the rules to prune irrelevant results. A preliminary evaluation of the parser shows that this approach works very well in real-world dialogue systems.