GEMINI: A Natural Language System for Spoken-Language Understanding

TL;DR

Gemini is a comprehensive spoken language understanding system that combines broad-coverage grammar, disfluency correction, and flexible parsing to improve robustness and interpretability in spoken language applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces Gemini, a novel system integrating syntactic, semantic, and disfluency handling components for improved spoken language understanding.

Findings

High coverage and efficiency in parsing English sentences

Effective disfluency recognition and correction

Enhanced robustness in spoken language interpretation

Abstract

Gemini is a natural language understanding system developed for spoken language applications. The paper describes the architecture of Gemini, paying particular attention to resolving the tension between robustness and overgeneration. Gemini features a broad-coverage unification-based grammar of English, fully interleaved syntactic and semantic processing in an all-paths, bottom-up parser, and an utterance-level parser to find interpretations of sentences that might not be analyzable as complete sentences. Gemini also includes novel components for recognizing and correcting grammatical disfluencies, and for doing parse preferences. This paper presents a component-by-component view of Gemini, providing detailed relevant measurements of size, efficiency, and performance.